


Grown in Captivity

by TitaniumBlossom



Category: Artemis Fowl - Eoin Colfer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Domme Voyeuse, F/M, Femdom, Fertility / Breeding, Magic-Users, Out of Character Opal due to Plot, Partial Mind Control, Plot With Porn, Resisted Dom, Scent Kink, Sub Exhib
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:27:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 21
Words: 63,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26369470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TitaniumBlossom/pseuds/TitaniumBlossom
Summary: A minute difference during the events of a Time Paradox create a situation in which Opal Koboi has Artemis and Holly in her grasp, complete with their entire memories. Armed with knowledge of a humiliating future, this Opal of the past has new plans of her own.Stranded in the past and with only each other to rely on, Holly and Artemis resist these plans, even as they force them closer together.
Relationships: Artemis Fowl II/Holly Short
Comments: 42
Kudos: 64





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The 'Plot with Porn' tag indicates this work spends a lot of time telling the story in a way that won't always include lemon in each chapter (for example, the first five chapters lack actual sexual activities, although there are kink references).
> 
> Noncon/Dubcon content warning: Oppressive conduct, especially with magic elements, creates conditions in which true consent may not exist.
> 
> Artemis is of legal age in all jurisdictions except for those with ages of consent above 20, but relative to long-lived fairies, this distinction is referenced in ways that could be considered problematic.

Artemis Fowl was fighting for his life. He realized it was the height of irony, but it was only then that knew Butler had been right about the importance of self-defense training. It was far too late. Artemis was struggling underneath the massive bulk of Damon Kronski, with next to no result. It made little sense to Artemis; he struck at Kronski’s eyes and even managed to knee the bloated man in his solar plexus. His attacks were not having an effect.  
  
Artemis managed to push himself further backwards and away from Kronski’s bulk. He tried to kick at the Extinctionist, hitting something plastic in his pocket. With a sinking feeling, Artemis realized it was a remote. On its signal, trapdoors would swing open and whatever found itself in the deeply unfortunate position above the mechanism would be dropped into a pit and then torched for dramatic effect.

By hitting the remote, Artemis sealed his fate. He realized his imminent demise as soon as the trap door dropped. His thoughts just before falling were nothing but regret.

His period of regret was cut short. Artemis realized there was no immediate danger when he passed through the flames as if they were projections. His fall had done little more than knock the breath out of him, but the impact was still a shock. If he hadn’t been stunned at the time, he would have used that most ignoble of fairy curses.

\--

“D’Arvit.”

Holly cursed under her breath as yet another path out of the leather market was blocked. The hired thugs of the Extinctionists were chasing her, no doubt commanded by Kronski. Once she heard the man’s preacherly tones commanding the guards, she realized that Artemis had not been successful in escaping. Effectively, by saving her from the Extinctionists, he had sacrificed himself.  
  
And now cornered, she prepared herself to fight her way through the Mud Men around her. She needed to hear the truth about Artemis from Kronski himself. She leapt into the air to kick the guard directly in front of her, but just as she pushed off the wall and into the air, a hail of needles passed under her.  
  
_Butler,_ she thought with a smile. _Even with that blebber holding him back, he has a sense for what is right._

The guards ahead of her collapsed, pumped full of sedative. Holly skipped over their unconscious bodies and headed straight for Kronski.  
  
“Fairy!” he shouted.  
  
“Yes, fairy,” she said, kicking him in the knee. It buckled and he fell over, with the presence of mind to fall forward onto her. It almost crushed Holly.  
  
Rather than knock him out right atop her, Holly opted to follow a hunch. Sticking two fingers up his nose, she let the magic spring forth in a search for the man’s missing sense of smell. As soon as the healing magic reached him, he rolled off of her as the unbearable stink of the leather market surged into his reformed nostrils. It saved her from being smothered to death, but it also incapacitated her source of information.

The young Artemis showed a surprising amount of decency. Accompanied by his Butler, he approached Holly from deeper in the alley.  
  
“I’m sorry.” the youth said, seeming almost genuine.

“Sorry?” Holly turned, still not trusting the child. “Sorry about what?”

Butler looked down.

“Your partner... died. Kronski overpowered him and he fell into the pit. I saw it myself.”  
  
Her first reaction was complete denial.  
  
_There’s no way that he could have died here, of all places. Killed by some waste like Kronski._

She looked down at the aforementioned waste of space and saw a contact lens in one of Kronski’s eyes. The other had fallen out, revealing an eye rimmed with red, the pupil worn ragged by a _mesmer_ enchantment.

The gears started turning in her head. The only fairy she knew that could be involved with lemurs was Opal Koboi, because she had driven them near to extinction herself. There was no proof that she was actually here, but Holly had a hunch so strong that her ears tingled at the implications. She didn’t let the young Artemis in front of her see her thoughts, hoping her expressionless face was enough to convince the humans of grief.  
  
“You have your diamonds,” she said to the young Artemis. “Go home to Mummy, Mud Boy.”

She turned her back on those friends-to-be and set off into the night. _Her_ Artemis was in trouble, and as soon as she set up her failsafe, she was going down through the flames to pull him back up herself.  
  
Artemis was definitely in need of assistance. He had fallen through holographic flames into the well-concealed chamber beneath, falling in _just_ the wrong way that his breath. Reflexively, he tried to fill his lungs, but it was poorly timed-- the container he was in became filled with a violet colored gas while metal bands moved to constrict him across his torso. Artemis was trapped without air, forced to take tiny gasp-like breaths of what he was certain was sleeping gas.  
  
With the last flash of his consciousness, he deduced the one being who would do this. _Opal Koboi._

His sleep was dreamless, but he woke on the verge of panic, shivering under the glare of artificial lights. At this angle, it shone directly at his eyes with full brightness, turning everything blurry. Artemis tried to gain information from every sense as they came back online. He could hear animals, mainly the sound of animals whimpering. He smelled disinfectant, filth, and blood in equal measure. As his vision returned, he could confirm his mental image of the room with his own eyes.  
  
The Opal Koboi of the past had set up a lab below the Extinctionist compound in order to funnel endangered animals into cages for harvest. From his position on a gurney, Artemis saw Opal staring at him, opaque pixie eyes drawn into a hostile squint.

“You are not Malachy Pasteur. In fact, I suspect Malachy Pasteur does not exist,” she said.

Opal took a few steps closer and hoisted a stun baton in one hand. Despite the compactness of her frame, her grip seemed sure and Artemis was sure Opal could wield it to great effect. He decided to remain silent for the time being and gather more information on this past version of his greatest nemesis.  
  
“I reviewed a recording of the madness that transpired up above,” she said. “You see, I was expecting something else entirely to come down my delivery chute. Instead of my prize, I had an elf, and then that was replaced by a Mud Man.”  
  
Again, Artemis confirmed silence as his best option. Opal Koboi was dangerous at any point in time, and the fact that she had the surveillance advantage over him made it essential that he conceal the time tunnel that had taken him here.  
  
“Your performance as the upstart Pasteur heir was good enough to convince Kronski and his followers,” Opal scoffed. “It did not convince me, certainly not once I checked your forged credentials.”

Artemis couldn’t suppress a gulp of nervousness. Perhaps his lack of control was an aftereffect of the sedatives, but it was better attributed to the fact that he was facing the worst odds yet-- ambushed by Opal Koboi and completely at a disadvantage.

Seeing his nervousness, Opal giggled.

“I know you are some kind of collaborator with the LEP. Who else would come to the defense of a fairy among Kronski’s bloodthirsty lot?”

One of Opal’s lackeys poked his head through the door, but Artemis couldn’t tell which of the pixie twins it was.

“Uh, Mistress? That thing you told me to tell you about is happening.”

Opal grimaced for a moment as if the male pixie’s voice offended her senses, but her face broke out into a sadistic smile as she waved at a screen to bring it to life.

Artemis saw Holly through the feed of a fairy camera hidden in the banquet hall. She was investigating the trapdoor entrance to Opal’s lab, dropping a piece of cutlery from the abandoned table, and watching it drop through the hologram. Whatever she saw, it convinced her that she could descend.

Opal chose that moment to act. “DNA Cannons, track Elfin target Zero-One.” She spoke orders to her weapons.

Then, taking a look at Artemis, she said the word that consigned Holly Short to his same damned fate.

“Fire.”

On the screen, Holly’s sixth sense must have sensed the danger, but it was not fast enough to stop the concealed turret in the Extinctionist’s banquet hall from launching a fully powered stun bolt at her back. Energy zinged across the reception hall and burned through her clothes instantly. Artemis winced as secondary flashes fanned out from the impact site.

Stunned into unconsciousness, Holly tipped into the pit she had been investigating moments before. The camera switched to a view within the gas chamber. Instead of releasing gas, Opal immediately secured Holly with the same type of robotic arms that held Artemis. Mervall and Descant wheeled her trolley in, her body still steaming from the shot. She was naked, skin visible where robot arms could not secure her to the gurney.

Opal shooed the pixie twins away and moved to Holly herself, levitating to look eye-to-eye with her captive elf. Opal put her hand to Holly’s chin and turned her unconscious head back and forth. Artemis noted that Opal’s hands were actually somewhat large for her size-- her long fingers easily grasped Holly’s head upwards from her chin. He had always known Holly to be the bigger, stronger fairy. He was coming to realize that the size advantage had always been relative.  
  
“The Lower Elements Police computer tells me that the female in front of me is Holly Short,” Opal said, still toying with the elf’s face. “But she looks a smidgen too young to be the true specimen.”

The screen suddenly switched to an LEP helmet feed of the current period’s Holly Short. Opal compared that to the elf in front of her. Even from behind, Artemis could tell that the genius pixie was connecting together all of the errata of the evening. Her missing lemur, a duplicate LEP officer, and even a Mud Man who appeared in no records and accompanied a fairy.

“Visitors from the future?” Opal asked herself. “I think yes.”

She made a slight gesture and Artemis found his gurney rolling off to one side of Holly’s position. At the last moment, Opal flicked her index finger, flipping the whole assemblage up so that he and Holly were both upright, their heads at equal levels. Opal placed the very tip of her left little finger in the center of Artemis’s forehead but covered Holly’s entire face with her right hand.  
  
Opal must have seen the question in Artemis’s eyes, so she explained herself, indulging one of the more cerebral impulses of criminal masterminds.

“I’m about to pull your memories directly out of your brain. For a Mud Man such as you, I only have to sully a single pinky to gain absolute control. The officer here is a magical creature, and requires a more complete hold from me.”

Artemis felt a sharp tingling sensation where Opal’s finger met his forehead. His head began aching intensely, his vision flickering. His thoughts raced, swirling like water down a drain. He realized he needed to act, or he and Holly would die as soulless _tabulae rasae_ in this stainless-steel nightmare.

“Koboi,” Artemis managed to say through his slack jaw, “What about your _prize_?”

Opal just cackled, grown unstable with her victory. Artemis realized that his memories contained just as much information about the lemur as his words did. He needed to raise the stakes of this situation to include his active participation.

“Wait a moment. If our accomplice is not contacted, the lemur will be disposed of,” Artemis said, struggling even to piece the words together as his mind drained into Opal. It was perhaps his worst bluff of all time, but he lacked the mental energy to criticize himself.

Opal heard the threat and stopped drawing from their minds for a brief moment. Then she returned, but with a rate that was much, much faster. Before, the spell had only been filtering his stream of thought as it passed by, but now he felt as if everything that made him a person was being drawn into Opal’s mind, sloshing out of him in frightening amounts.

_I have just hastened our demise._ Artemis lamented. _I’m sorry, Holly. This was all my fault._

Soon, he was incapable of even the deep emotion of regret and Artemis was reduced to animal instinct for the first time since infancy. He felt nothing but existential terror in the brief moment it took before Opal had completely excised his mind from his body. The deep black curtain of the void dropped over him, and Artemis felt himself become nothing.


	2. Chapter 2

Holly woke to screaming. Her back felt as if it was on fire, and her surroundings seemed to be nothing but bright lights and cold metal. A Mud Man shrieked and cried, accompanied by the hoots and roars of other distressed animals around her. Her first instinct was to get up and do something about it, but her first attempt revealed what was happening.

She was fastened to some kind of standing gurney. The strange shrieking Mud Man next to her was Artemis Fowl, or at least what he looked like through the time tunnel. The other panicking animals were locked in floor-to-ceiling cages, some stacked atop one another. The total amount of despair around her was overpowering, but what really drew her attention was a young Opal Koboi below her, flopping on the floor as if in an impression of Damon Kronski’s defeat aboveground.

_Okay, Opal is down, that’s a good sign. Artemis is down, too. That’s probably not as good._

She flexed against the robot arms binding her to the upright platform and had the secondary realization that she was entirely nude.

_D’Arvit, this is absolutely not good._

As a soldier, her nakedness was only worrying because it meant she lacked her gear. As a newly hormonal elf, her fully exposed body was worrying because it had some mistaken impression of only being acclimated to its sensitivities. The cold metal held her, but her shivering came from a discomfort greater than that.

Holly decided her first priority would be Artemis. Opal was down for the moment, but they were still tied up in a lab. Without her magic, she needed the resources of another genius to counter Opal.

Artemis was still yelling, stopping only to take sharp breaths. It was unsettling to look at him like that. Holly had never seen him lose total control. With both of her limbs bound, Holly did the only thing that came to her mind to pull Artemis’s attention back to her. She spat at his face with every bit of moisture she could gather in her dry mouth.

The droplets scattered across Artemis’s pale face, and actually seemed to have some effect. He stopped all his noisemaking, but Holly’s new sense of relief was crushed when she saw him turn to her. The eyes were absent of anything human-- instead of his piercing glare, Artemis’ face was dull.

“Artemis?” she asked hesitantly, seeing no recollection in his eyes. “Arty?”

Opal’s twin henchmen, Mervall and Descant, had been delaying as long as possible in case all the noise was coming from one of Opal’s tantrums. Instead of arriving to some sort of prison break, they saw that only Opal lay on ground while her captives still struggled in their restraints.

“What did you do?” Mervall asked, genuinely surprised.

Descant rushed halfway down the length of the lab before stopping and pausing. Holly didn’t blame him for the hesitation. If the most powerful magician was out of action, could he risk entering the kill zone?

Descant turned to his brother.

“Why don’t we just take the shuttle and split?” He shouted over the din. “If the elf is LEP, there could be a Retrieval team headed here right now.”

While Mervall pondered the decision, Holly took a second look around herself. She knew there was no backup coming-- she needed to take this opportunity. She spotted what she needed on her left, Opal’s stun baton, left unguarded on top of a stack of medical supplies. If she could move her gurney, she might be able to grab it _._ Holly heaved herself up and down with all of her force.  
  
It was difficult for two reasons, the first being that she was rubbing her burned back against her restraints. The second source of difficulty came from the tiny segments on the metal arms holding her in place-- her body rubbed forcefully against them, and her skin had become surprisingly sensitive, stiffening under the cold and the friction. Holly pushed past the distractions of her body, seeing the stunstick get ever closer with each _hop._

Her fingers stretched outwards from hands restricted to her hips. She could get a hold on the baton with just a few more seconds...

Holly Short didn’t get those few seconds. The loud _thumps_ of her gurney must have broken Opal out of her trance, and the arguing of the pixie twins brought Koboi into full combat alert. She announced her wakefulness with a surge of red lightning that emerged even before she began to levitate above the ground. Holly saw the signs of black magic forming in the air and tried one last time to grab the stun baton, but only managed to knock it askew. It rolled off of the table and fell to the floor, taking Holly’s hopes with it.

Opal Koboi completely ignored Holly. Her anger was directed at Mervall and Descant, who had completely prostrated themselves to her, begging for mercy.

“Please, Mistress. You’re the most brilliant fairy ever. No one is more powerful than you. Please--”

“I know I am perfect,” Opal said. “I just have no need for you anymore.”

The red lightning sparking around her coalesced into a tiny ball of swirling energy. Opal looked at the energy in her hand for a fleeting moment before flicking her wrist, sending the deadly projectile spinning towards the twins. It skittered as it bounced down the narrow corridor, shooting tendrils of deadly electricity out along the whole length of the lab and into every cage. Holly closed her eyes. She couldn’t bear to see Opal’s spell as it committed an act of mass extinction in the lab.  
  
When Holly opened her eyes, all that was left of Mervall and Descant were two circles of soot. Ash poured freely from the stacked cages where animals had been only moments before, and a smell of burning was thick in her nostrils.

Opal remained levitating, brushing a bit of soot from the edge of her robe.

“I have no need for beasts and fools in _my_ future,” she spoke aloud.

Opal turned towards Holly. Complete calm struck out at her from a darkly beautiful face. The pixie descended down to the elf’s height, coming so close that her large eyes almost entirely covered Holly’s view.

“All I need for victory is _you_ ,” Opal said sweetly.

Before Holly had a chance to react, Opal had forced her mouth against hers in a tight-lipped kiss, lasting a split moment. Opal giggled at Holly’s disgust and confusion-- it was she had wanted to see.

“While you were asleep, I drew memories from the minds of you and your pet Mud Man,” Opal explained with relish. “It would seem that you two have defeated me twice in your future, despite some heavy odds.”

“And we’ll do it again,” Holly interrupted.  
  
If Koboi hadn’t killed her yet, she would likely not be killed for a while. She needed to get under her skin. _Just like Arty would._

Opal merely laughed at the interruption, a dangerous sign when she would have been derailed in the other world.

“Defeat me _again?_ ” Opal asked. “You don’t realize yet, elf, but the pixie you see before you is undefeated.” A smirk appeared on her face.

“Let me put it in terms you might internalize: My playbook is entirely different now. A new season of crunchball has started, and the record is already one to zero in my favor.”

Holly grimaced. Opal was right, in the worst possible way. By coming to the past, she and Artemis were introducing themselves to a new villain, one who had just read their entire lives as memories, an Opal Koboi who was crazy in an entirely new way. She couldn’t help a fleeting glance at Artemis. _Where had his memories gone?_

As if reading her mind, Opal moved over to Artemis, who looked blankly at her.

“Oh, I can practically hear your thoughts, Holly” Opal said. “Poor, poor _Arty._ Oh, my beautiful, handsome Mud Boy, what have they done?”

Opal tapped the side of her head with one immaculately manicured finger.

“I’ve seen it all, Holly Short. Just an hour ago, I hardly knew you existed, and now it feels like we’re the best of friends,” she said. “After all, you’ve shared so many _secrets_ with me.”

It didn’t take a supergenius to know what kind of secrets Opal was talking about. The pixie’s new personality was out to degrade her, maybe as punishment for the humiliation she had experienced in memories.

“Since we’re friends, I’ll do you a favor,” Opal said. “If you want, I’ll replace everything I took out of Arty’s surprisingly adult body... but I have one condition.”

The pixie gleefully waited for a response, bobbing up and down in the air. Holly knew that keeping silent might be the better option, but she also knew that the one person who could compete in mind-games with Opal was Artemis Fowl. He was an essential part of any plan.

“What do you want, pixie?” Holly asked, frustrated.

Opal wagged a finger at her.

“Now, now, Holly, is that how friends talk to each other?” she asked. “No, it isn’t. Call me by my name, I have a favor to ask.”

“Sure, Opal. What can I do for you, _pal?_ ” Holly said between clenched teeth.

“Thanks for asking, old friend,” Opal said, taking glee at her stolen words. “I’m willing to return Artemis... you just have to say a little sentence.”

“What sentence?” Holly asked. Her ears tingled, so she had an idea.

Opal pointed to her. “ _Say this: I love to kiss Mud Boys_.”

“You’re insane,” Holly snapped.

“Me, insane?” Opal giggled again. “You’re the degenerate kissing Mud Children. Arty’s memories tell me that Mud Men have a syndrome named for people who grow to feel for their captors.”

“He’s changed,” Holly said. “Artemis has put his evil behind him. It makes him better than you.”

“Hmm,” Opal remarked. If Artemis had been awake, he would have realized that Opal was copying a habit of his mother, Angeline Fowl.

“Arty lied to get you here,” Opal said. “A stunning betrayal, even if he did it for his Mummy. Didn’t you say something just a few hours ago about his elf-kissing days being over? For shame, Holly.”

Holly did not believe what she was hearing. The privacy of her own memories had never been invaded before. Opal was smug, made secure by the pilfering. She kept up the pressure.

“I know how you felt about that kiss. It’s no good to keep those feelings bottled up. Come on, it’s just me and you, don’t hold it back. Say it!”

Artemis responded to Opal’s tone with an instinctual growl. She responded by clenching her fist, forcing his mouth shut with telekinetic force.

Holly knew it was no use remaining alone, nude and tied up in Opal’s secret lab. She’d say whatever it took to get her sole ally back, even if it wasn’t true.

“I love to kiss Mud Boys,” Holly lied.

Opal wagged her finger again, mockingly.

“Come now, Holly, we mustn’t lie to our friends. Say it again, with gusto.”

“I love to kiss Mud Boys!” Holly shouted. Despite herself, she felt a blush come to her cheeks. Shame was a useless emotion to her now. She powered through.

Opal’s smile was ghoulish, every line in her wide face twisted in glee. “That was better, but I really am unconvinced. Try this: ‘I’m Holly Short and I love to kiss Mud Boys.’”

“I’m Holly Short and I love to kiss Mud Boys,” Holly repeated, the blush increasing. Her head felt clouded, but she could detect no magic being used on her. It was all internal.

“Hmm,” Opal said, unmoved. “It feels incomplete. I’d like you to add your police rank.”

The command cut through the haze in her mind in an instant, revealing what Koboi was aiming towards all this time. She wanted to break Holly down, all the way to her very sense of self. Opal would work to reduce every source of inner strength available to her until there was nothing left that provided resistance.

“I can’t do anything if you won’t help yourself,” Opal said. “Artemis needs you, and you’re going to let something like shame stop you?”

_When I get my hands on that you…_ Holly thought.

“Come on, _pal,_ ” Opal said. “Rank, name, and your favorite activity, and be quick about it. It’s tough to me hold onto all his filthy Mud memories. I might let a few go.”

“I’m Captain Holly Short and I love kissing Mud Boys!” Holly was shouting.

“Again!” Opal matched her intensity.  
  
“I’m Captain Holly Short of the LEP and I love kissing Mud Boys!”

“Close. One last time!”

Holly gathered up her breath for the effort. She would yell at the top of her voice-- Opal wasn’t expecting that.

“I’m Captain Holly short of LEP Recon and I love kissing Mud Boys!”

Her shout echoed through the emptied lab, the vibrations freeing up another avalanche of ash. As it died away, everything was silent except for Holly’s deep breathing. Her face was red-hot, flushed just from her own words.

“ _Bravo,_ ” Opal said, applauding loudly. “An amazing performance. Were you even acting?”

“Give him back,” Holly said, still recovering her breath.

Opal unclenched her fist, a wide, unnatural smile appearing on her face. Holly turned her head to her right to see Artemis, hoping to see the life return to him. Instead, she found that Artemis was already awake, but instead of the razor-sharp gaze she had come to rely on, he looked meekly away.

“You were doing so well that I let him return a little early. How did you like the show, _Arty?_ ” Opal teased.

Artemis closed his eyes and let his head drop. _Feigning unconsciousness._

“Hmm,” Opal said. “The Mud Boy isn’t as eager to tell the truth as his mistress. How troublesome.”

Opal grasped Artemis’s shoulder-length hair and pulled to turn his face up to hers. There was a breathless moment where Koboi looked into his face, unmoving.

Then Opal Koboi slapped Artemis with all the force she could muster.

“Stop!” Holly shouted.

Artemis’s mismatched eyes snapped open at that, just in time for Koboi to kiss him. For Holly, the sight didn’t feel real. Opal’s head blocked everything except from sight except for one blue iris, swinging wildly until it locked onto Holly.

_Help,_ Holly imagined him saying. She struggled against the restraints, tried to contort her body and wiggle past the arms, but she remained stuck in place.

After a seeming eternity attached to Artemis, Opal leaned back from him. She made a show of licking her lips, switching hands to show off to Holly.  
  
“What do you know?” She joked. “I love to kiss Mud Boys too.”

Then she slapped Artemis on his other side, being sure to include her pointed fingernails. Artemis yelped with pain at the scratches, prompting Holly to start pushing against the robot limbs again.

“Let that be a lesson, Arty. Mommy doesn’t like when her guests misbehave.” Opal nodded, self-satisfied. Then she began floating towards the exit, stopping as she passed by Holly.

“I’ll give you two a little privacy, since we’re such good friends,” she said. “No escape attempts, please. I believe in collective punishment.”

To illustrate her point, Opal reached for Holly’s chest. The octo-restraints moved so that the elf now had her breasts exposed, bracketed by the arms crossing her just above and below. Using the side of her nail, Opal scraped a tiny white trail down the middle of Holly’s chest, flicking right near the bottom brush a nipple, standing stiff in the cold.

Holly glared at Opal, who returned the gaze with a pantomime wink.

“I’ll keep this a secret from Arty over there,” she whispered into Holly’s ear before closing her fingers in a gentle pinch over the pale brown swell of her areola.

Opal made a show of nodding so that Holly got the message, then departed in haste. Her flight itself was eager, even as she passed over the ashy remains of her work. The sudden destruction must have meant that Opal had found something she greatly preferred.


	3. Chapter 3

**Eight Years in the Future**

Foaly was the first to speak.

“Boy, that was the longest ten seconds of _my_ life. How’s the crew, demon? I hope they kept their parts to themselves this time.”

He peered intently through the screen at Number One, and saw the imp was still alone in the room.

“Where are they?” the centaur asked. “Tell the Mud Boy that the People aren’t fans of playing Hide and go Bleep when survival is on the line.”

He saw Number One look around in puzzlement. Foaly was getting worried too but had one last joke left in him.

“Maybe they’re nearby. Try listening for a lemur. If you don’t know what that sounds like, you can pretty much just imagine a rusty monkey.”

Number One only got more confused.

“I pulled _something_ back,” he said. “It was a tiny spark of my energy, so I just assumed Holly was running dry, as per usual. I’m being serious here, Foaly, I can’t sense either of them in my range.”

He heard a sound from the wardrobe. He froze in place and turned his ear to hear better, cupping his stubby fingers. After a few seconds, he looked at Foaly’s camera. “It sounds like a rusty monkey.”

He opened the wardrobe door, revealing a single sad-looking lemur which sniffed at Artemis’s old clothes with a distinct air of melancholy.

“Only the lemur made it?” N⁰1 wondered. “How is that even possible?”

He thought through the problem a little more.

“If they aren’t here, _where_ are they? _When_ are they?”

“N⁰1, is there a chance you... fumbled?” Foaly whinnied anxiously. He couldn’t help it; space-time physics were not in his skillset.

“Fumbled?” N⁰1 asked. “Like in crunchball? No. I got a clean pull, but the lemur was the only thing that got sent through.”

N⁰1 reached a hand to the lemur and it sniffed it at him. Just before it climbed onto his arm, the door to the guest room banged open. The lemur jumped onto N⁰1’s head as a gigantic mountain of a Mud Man rushed in the door.

“What are you doing here?” Butler asked. “Where is Artemis? I know you wouldn’t be up here without Captain Short around, either.”

“Slow down, Butler,” Foaly forced himself to say, if only to quiet his own panicked mind. “They went back in time to get the cure for his mother. That lemur holds it.”

Butler’s scowl grew more severe.

“Mrs. Fowl made a miraculous recovery moments ago,” he said. “She’s saying something had possessed her, something from the past. It’s gone now, but I was in the cellar, with no idea how I got there.”

“A mesmer?” N⁰1 squeaked. “And a possession?”

Something dawned on the demon warlock, and an ice-cold shiver crawled up his back.

“Where is that special doctor of yours?” N⁰1 asked. “And his assistant, too.”

Butler stepped away into the hall, shutting the door tightly behind him. When he returned, his scowl had compressed into a squint of full rage.

“The doctor was mesmered too. He doesn’t know anything about an assistant. Sounds like magic. Where’s Artemis?”

N⁰1 looked to Foaly’s camera, a realization now apparent to him.

“They broke the timestream,” he said, quiet even in his own hearing. “They broke our whole timestream.”

Foaly caught up quickly. It took some jumps in logic, but the new hypothesis held up to his own tests.

“Some enemy from our past attempted to jump into our future and possess Angeline Fowl, faking a disease. By staying behind, Holly and Arty accidentally stopped her possession from ever happening. They must not have been able to jump forward for some reason. They’re stuck in the past without an easy way back.”

Butler stumbled to a stool by the door and shoved his face into his hands. He needed to process those words one by one. They sounded like complete nonsense.

After a few moments, he spoke.

“You’re telling me that due to some form of time magic I’ve never heard of, Artemis and Officer Short have disappeared and might have spent the last eight years marooned in the past?”

N⁰1 pondered the question.

“Yes,” he answered bluntly. “Either that or he and Holly are long dead.”

The tortured look on Butler’s face frightened N⁰1 more than any threat could have, so he amended his statement in the interest of everyone’s safety.

“For the record, I think they’re alive,” N⁰1 said.

“How?” Butler demanded. “And don’t say magic.”

N⁰1 opened and closed his mouth a few times, deciding on something he could say without too much guilt.

“Think about it. If either of them were dead, what kind of world would this be?”

He must have seriously misjudged the famously resilient spirit of Mud Men, because Butler’s response was to stand up and punch the wardrobe, reducing it to splinters. The lemur started squawking with a new intensity.

Foaly had already mentally tuned out everything at the Fowl Estate. _If Holly and Artemis were still alive, why hadn’t he heard from them? Where could they be?_  
  
He began a deep scan from every single available sensor on his network, and even sent out a few new ones. If the two of them were trapped somewhere, finding them would give him gloating rights over them for centuries. And if they were dead, he needed every single detail so that he could avenge their loss himself.

**Eight Years in the Past**

The two were silent for a good while after Opal had left the lab. Holly was the first one to speak.

“Artemis, are you okay?”

She gasped when she saw the red scratches left by Opal’s slap. They had already dried, but they marked the entire side of Artemis’s face in even lines, starting just below his hazel eye. He still kept his gaze turned away from Holly.

“I made a serious mistake. This whole imbroglio began with my dishonesty and my failure with the Extinctionists has ensured my mother will never receive her cure.”

“Enough of that,” Holly snapped. “I don’t need apologies or regrets right now. I need a fully functional Artemis.”

As usual, Holly’s words seemed to pull Artemis back into the reality of the situation. He drew a deep breath and held it in.

 _Okay, breathing exercises,_ Holly thought. _Better than whining_.

She followed suit, feeling some amount of balance return to her mind with every breath. She was becoming glad that Koboi’s arms still covered her nakedness, even if her upright position was beginning to ache.

Not that Artemis was staring. He was still unsettled by the experience of being drawn into Opal’s mind and then spit out into his unfamiliar body. It had felt as if Opal had flattened out his entire life and gone over every minute detail while his actual self was forced to spectate the deep violation. He had almost not felt the slaps Opal had punished his resistance with. Almost. And then there was the matter of the bizarre kiss.

Artemis took a brief reprieve in his breathing exercises to examine Holly. She was naked, yes, but cocooned in overlapping metal bonds that covered anything he hadn’t seen before. Opal’s power play with the ‘kissing Mud Boys’ move was worrying. Whatever she had seen of her potential future had bent her in a strange direction-- willing to kill her assistants and destroy her own work while keeping her worst enemies alive.

Holly was following his example with the breathing exercises. Because he was larger, he was already seeing significant progress with every inhalation. By fully expanding his lungs, the now-passive robotic arms would be pushed backwards by a tiny amount as they attempted to avoid breaking their quarry. He noticed that when they returned, they did not go all the way to their original position. Whoever had programmed the arms must have made mistakes in rounding the numbers. Through cumulative error and the power of gravity, Artemis knew he and Holly could slip through the limbs if they had enough time.  
  
His primary concern was deducing what sort of activity had taken Opal away from the lab. There were several potential answers, but Artemis feared it was the one that took place in sessions that lasted anywhere from minutes to hours, although he was sure that Opal would take the requisite time to shower afterward, which might grant at least five extra minutes for his plan.

If he was lucky, the new Opal was far, far more interested in immediate self-gratification than the one he had known. He and Holly depended upon it.

Indeed, Opal was engaged in self-gratification, but it was definitely not the sort that Artemis was expecting.

She was zipping above the streets of Fez, completely invisible and searching for her last loose end. She spotted him hunched over at the edge of his favorite _souk_. Diving in from the sky, she had both hands over his skull before he could react. She channeled a tiny spark from her vast reserves of magic and killed Damon Kronski instantly. He flopped over without a sound and Opal made sure to destroy any retinal evidence _._

_Foaly would be stumped, even if he got his childish plungers plugged to this corpse’s eyes._

She had to remove all evidence of what was now happening from the LEP. She had looked at the location of the tracker she had placed on the lemur, and it was predictably headed to the Fowl Estate in a contraband shuttle. Holly’s memories had demonstrated that the animal was already loaded with the last bits of N⁰1’s magic set up for a time jump, so Opal decided it was a waste of time to chase it. She had more valuable subjects now.

The whole impetus behind stealing the lemur was to gain access to the time stream and prevent herself from ever being defeated. Now that she had seen her potential future, it all seemed rather pointless. Supposedly, she was going to give up her quest for magical power in exchange for a complicated ruse with Cudgeon and the Goblin Triad. When that failed, her future self’s plan was to use her clone (which was still gestating at the present moment) to escape prison and kill all of her enemies _before_ going into hiding as a human. Then, she would destroy fairy society.

Seeing herself be defeated by the same group of fools four times (twice from each of her captives) had seriously threatened Opal’s sanity. After an impromptu meditation session, she felt herself returning with a new force. There was no need to scheme and plot like some cartoon character-- she was Opal Koboi, already the sole owner and operator of the premier tech corporation in the Lower Elements. She had already proved herself greater than her father and continued to dominate Foaly in every technological challenge that mattered. It was what the Hey-Hey monks always told her during counseling sessions, right before she mind wiped them.

 _You are everything you need to be,_ Opal told herself, following their mantra. _You have everything you need to be victorious._

She returned to the lab in good spirits. Her nemeses from another life were on the verge of escaping, but Opal put a quick stop to that as soon as she saw them wiggling out of their restraints.

“A rounding error?” she said once she identified how her own tech could have come so close to failing. “I never caught it in testing because I didn’t think of setting the devices upright. Thanks, Arty.”

After being in the minds of Holly and Artemis, Opal understood that the two were only so close together because of the years they had assisted each other and the immense danger they faced each time...

 _It disturbs them how easily I slip inside of their little circle,_ she thought with some smugness. _If only they knew what comes next._

“What did I say about escape attempts?” she said sternly. “You’ve made Mommy very angry.”

Then she whirled to face Holly, who still managed to look impertinent. Opal had come to develop tender feelings for the elf after seeing the difficulties of her life. Her strong face was punctuated by a pointed chin that balanced it into what Opal liked to think was a ‘well-defended beauty’. The elf’s lips were small but plump, almost alluring, were it not for the permanent frown she displayed around Opal. In a way, she was a truer rival than Artemis. A beautiful fairy who was her opposite.

“One day, you’re going to smile for me,” Koboi said. “One day, you will be as loyal to me as I have been to you.”

Opal didn’t give her the time to understand.

“Today is not the day for smiles, Holly. You both were trying to escape, even though I forbade it. Your Mud Boy probably taught you, even though I told you both it was forbidden.”

Opal looked over her shoulder at Artemis, who had shown a surprising amount of verbal restraint.

“Did you hear that, Arty? Mommy is about to tell you what the punishment is.”

Opal drew a complex rune in the air, red beams of energy sparking behind her hands as they worked in tandem. On seeing the symbol being drawn, Holly gasped.

“Yes, Holly, old friend, that _is_ a rune of control,” Opal said sweetly. “Because you and your pet couldn’t exercise self-control, I have to place it on one of you.”

She pointed at Holly, then at Artemis.

For the first time after being locked up, the two prisoners finally made true eye contact. Opal shivered at the sight of them so determined, with their mismatched eyes mirroring each other.

“You get to choose between yourself. Who will willingly become my thrall?”

“Me,” they said in unison.

 _How admirable,_ Opal thought. _And how predictable. Now is the part where they fight over which one will sacrifice themselves._

“Oh, both of you want to give yourself up to Mommy?” Opal asked.

“No, just me,” Holly said. “You can trust me. I’m your friend, right?”

 _Only when it suits you, Poppy,_ Opal thought ruefully.

“It should be me, Opal,” Artemis said, his voice doing a good impression of masculine confidence.

The pixie propped her chin on her fist, floating like a fairy version of _The Thinker._ She didn’t want her captives accepting her geas as a noble sacrifice. She needed to reduce their strength altogether.

“Okay, Arty, convince me it should be you,” she said.

“I’m the one who came up with the escape plan,” he said. “You need to keep my actions limited to prevent any further attempts.”

Holly interrupted by shaking her head viciously.

“Don’t listen to the Mud Boy,” Holly said, surprising Opal with the sudden venom in her voice. “You’ve seen it for yourself, his plans need someone like me to work. He can hardly carry them out himself.”

“Amazing,” Opal said, moving the hex to face at the elf. “Sorry, Arty. But your mistress here thinks you don’t need a leash.”

“You’ve seen both of our memories-- you’ve even seen our thoughts,” Artemis said. “Holly has had 80 years to grow, and I have spent barely 18 years. I am young, for a Mud Man. Don’t you think I could come to surpass you?”

“Are you saying Fairies are actually the slow and dimwitted ones?” Opal asked. “Has Holly actually been stupid all this time?”

The hex was a threat serious enough to force Artemis to play Opal’s game. Even Holly had stopped arguing to see what he would say.

“Holly...” Artemis hesitated. “Holly is harmless compared to me.”

 _There_ is _such a thing as too much, Mud Boy._

“I’m not harmless,” Holly said, with just a hint of actual hurt in her tone.

Opal listened to her. “Oh? Tell me more.”

“Artemis needs accomplices,” Holly said. “It’s how he thinks. Take away his backup, and he’s left with the weakest piece on his chessboard: the king.”

Opal let out a genuine chuckle. “That makes you the queen, then?” It felt like she had spent a lifetime bored until these two had dropped into her lab.

“She’s fecking lying,” Artemis suddenly shouted, the human curse ringing out like a hex of its own.

“Oh?”

“She clearly hasn’t played a serious game of chess in her life,” he said. “The king is the most powerful piece because it decides when the game is over. And Holly isn’t even a Queen. At best, she’s a knight.”

The chess metaphor did actually pass over Holly’s head, but Opal was sure that she understood she was being insulted.

“He doesn’t even have any magic!” Holly shouted back. “He’ll never be able to oppose you.”

 _Her precious magic, the last resort for elves in a debate,_ Opal thought. _The time has come to correct her biased assumptions._

With a flick, she sent the control hex hurtling towards Artemis. It phased through his shirt but instantly burned when it met the skin underneath.

He writhed in pain, spasming as the rune locked in, a single X spinning within a double circle. It would last as long as the burn scars did, which would be his entire natural life.

Opal waited until Artemis’s gasps became actual cries, then pulled the hex back, confident that the marks had been made deep within him.

“Okay, Arty, here are some basic commandments,” Opal said cheerfully.

“Listen to Opal.”

 _This encourages obeisance._  
  
“Don’t hurt Opal. Don’t let Opal come to harm.”

_Not that the Mud Boy has ever been capable of using force._

“Stay close to me; Don’t run away.”

_That would prevent escape and stalling._

“You mustn’t let Holly run away either.”

_He must have known I wouldn’t leave that particular loophole open. I have turned him into both a prisoner and prison guard._

Opal hovered over Holly’s head in a fit of elation and hung upside down, talking next to her sensitive ears.

“Any last requests to force on your pet, old friend?” Opal asked. “It’s a lot easier to do all my _geasa_ at once.”

Holly gave a look of unrestrained malice.

 _The elf doesn’t know what she’s missing out on,_ Opal thought.

“Let’s test my rune, then,” Opal said. “Arty, could you bare your chest for us?”

Freed from his physical restraints, Artemis took a tentative step forward on unbalanced legs. He unbuttoned the top four buttons of his silk shirt and pulled at the fabric to reveal two concentric circles burned into his flesh. The circles were filled with rays that crossed it at even intervals. It certainly would be hurting right now.

“Look, the Mud Boy got a bicycle wheel tattooed to his chest,” Opal said. “What a silly little creature.”

 _That’s strange,_ Opal found herself thinking. _I’ve never made light of my own work before._

 _“_ We’ve spent enough time in this graveyard of a lab,” Opal said. “Better places await.”

Opal used her computer to set the facility’s array of nuclear batteries to self-destruct, then freed Holly from the table she had been strapped to for hours. Of course, she was still restrained by multiple layers of magic, but Opal hoped that the elf might appreciate the personal touch.

“Arty, be a dear and escort your mistress to the shuttle,” Opal said.

Artemis nodded, his gaze somber.

“As you wish, Ms. Koboi.”

_The Mud Man makes a surprisingly good servant. With that level of intelligence, he can’t help but anticipate my wishes._

Opal let Holly float to the ground and allowed her to shuffle with a limited range of movement. Artemis dutifully escorted her from behind, placing one hand on her bare shoulder. He still wouldn’t look directly at Holly.

 _We’ll fix that once we’re on the shuttle,_ Opal reminded herself.

The shuttle was a top-of-the-line luxury model with a shielding system of her own design. Even if her ‘animal phase’ had come to a sudden and ignoble end here, it had at least taught her how to be hidden as she zipped around the planet, chasing the things she thought could make her whole.

“Place Holly in the cage,” she commanded.

Artemis didn’t move immediately, a delay Opal could have predicted. The obeisance _geas_ on the Mud Man was designed to be weak. Even though Artemis had to listen to Opal, she allowed him the ability to resist.

_If I needed a drone to mindlessly follow my orders, I would have trapped his soul and acted as the puppeteer to his abandoned body._

“Holly, I’d like you to step into the cage,” Opal said. “Come on, it’s not even a _bad_ cage. It was made to contain animals much larger than you.”

When Holly didn’t shuffle forward, Opal got angry. She pointed her hand at Artemis and accessed his control rune directly. She heard it spinning up with a low hum as more magic entered it.

“Throw the elf in the cage, Arty!” she snarled. “She refuses my hospitality.”

From behind, Opal saw Artemis’s body jerk as her magical control asserted itself. With a hitherto unforeseen strength, he grabbed Holly under her shoulder and at her thigh and heaved her into the cage. There was some element of control left to him because Holly was not thrown bodily against the bars. She landed in the center of the cage, rubberized floor preventing any injury. Even still, the places where Artemis had grabbed her were still marked with large handprints.

Opal closed the cage with a flourish.

“Let that be a lesson, Holly. Mommy always gets what she wants.”

She pointed at Artemis.

“Be a dear and make sure your mistress is comfortable. I’m off to make sure we won’t all die when my lab goes off.”

**ELSEWHERE, in that reality**

Mulch Diggums found himself awake and behind the controls of a stolen LEP shuttle, hovering over the Irish Sea. He had no idea what could have led him to such a position but shrugged off any sense of confusion. He frequently stole from the LEP, and momentary forgetfulness was a common side effect of eating certain cave lichen. For a moment, he felt like he was forgetting something very important, but the sudden arrival of a LEP interceptor craft on his sensors shook all of that away. It was just him against the world, after all. He had nobody watching his back and needed to get hustling or he’d be in prison for a long time. He set his thrusters at max and got back on the run.

\--

Artemis Fowl the Second and Butler were wrapped up in the curtains of the guest room. Artemis did not understand why he was there, and he was having difficulty generating a valid explanation.

“Butler,” he asked, young voice quavering.

“Yes?”

“Were we just playing a very poor game of hide-and-go-seek?”

“I don’t believe so.”

The young Artemis unwrapped himself from the curtains. Butler followed his lead, almost as unsure as his young charge. They searched their own persons for any sign of what had just happened.

“I have a bag in my coat pocket filled with diamonds,” Artemis said. “And I believe this is lemur hair on my shoulder. Despite a sudden bout of memory loss, our deal with the Extincionists was made successfully.”

“You may have secured the bag,” Butler said, “But I worry about our sudden lapse in consciousness.”

With both his mother and father on his mind, Artemis was too distracted to pursue the matter any further. Butler, a veteran of many a combat operation, decided he could deal with this bizarre event at some distant point in the future. It was his preferred coping mechanism.

And thus, the time-traveling duo became forgotten in the world of the past, swallowed up by a simple ripple in the Time Stream. With small and ultimately insignificant differences, the world moved on.


	4. Chapter 4

**In the Past**

Artemis handed his jacket through the bars to Holly and sat down with his back to the cage. He had offered his shirt too, but the LEP Captain responded with a stern headshake of refusal.

_She does not want to see the rune that has been permanently burned into my chest,_ Artemis thought. It gave him no pain, but he could feel it obstructing him. He wanted to escape, to free Holly, to overpower Opal and find some way to return home. They didn’t have much time left before their window through time would close.

Holly hissed in pain, and Artemis couldn’t help but look over his shoulder. The DNA cannon that stunned Holly had left a painful burn and she couldn’t even drape the jacket around herself without being overcome by pain.

“We need to treat that injury,” Artemis said.

“Why?” Holly asked. “To help me escape”

_Yes,_ Artemis wanted to say, but his mouth wouldn’t move.

Holly saw the struggle and smiled with bitterness.

“Why’d you have to take the hex, Artemis?” she asked. She sounded wearier than ever.

“We can discuss that later. We should first consider our survival priorities,” Artemis advised. It was what he knew Holly would tell him if the situation was reversed.

Artemis’ words helped her. Holly’s eyes cleared, and the soldier returned to her body.

“Find me some medical supplies. Get me a weapon if you can.”

Artemis nodded. He found that he could not even bring the image of a weapon to mind. Somehow, the control hex was suppressing his ability to recognize things he might use to resist Opal. He found a first aid kit in a locker. There were no spare clothes or fabric that he might offer to Holly to cover her. Up to this point, he had averted his gaze, but he thought that she would prefer the privacy of actual garments.

He approached the cage and held the wallet-sized first aid kit out to Holly, inspecting his own toes rather than embarrass his friend.

“Artemis,” she said. “It’s okay to look up. You gave me your jacket, remember?”

Holly’s expression was soft. She held the oversize suit jacket at her neck so that it looked more like a cloak shrouded around her. Artemis had to correct himself. He had been looking away all this time in an attempt to spare Holly. But he was the one clothed, walking free and uncaged. He could recognize the strategy Opal was employing; Holly as the more mature and experienced person, so she was being singled out. If he avoided her, he advanced Opal’s agenda.

The contents of the first aid kit were meant only to stabilize the user until magical healing could be provided. Instead of bandages, there was a tube filled with a foaming agent that would create a binding layer to seal wounds and staunch bleeding. A single tube of burn ointment was also included, scarcely larger than Artemis’ little finger.

She faced away from him, shrugging the jacket off her shoulders, and letting it slide down to her waist. She tied it off using the arms, leaving her burned back exposed all the way down to her hips. Artemis judged the star-shaped site of impact to be second-degree burn, but the severity decreased away from the entry point.

“How does it look?” Holly asked.

“Painful, but not life-threatening,” Artemis said. “But it would be best to apply the ointment now.”

She tossed the orange tube at Artemis, hitting his chest. He managed to get a hand on it before it fell.

“Just moving my arms makes the burn act up. Could you get my back for me?”

“O-of course,” he stammered. “This is clearly the optimal way.”

Holly smiled and laid down right next to him. They were separated by bars, but Artemis could reach his arms through. His hands hovered over her, feeling her skin radiate heat, its color like _cafe au lait_ reddened to an unnatural tint.

Artemis read the Gnommish instructions on the tube. The ointment would relieve pain, cool skin, and provide a protective coating that encouraged healing. It had an aroma reminiscent of black tea that grew as he applied it in even lines down her back. Once she had sufficient coverage, Artemis started spreading the ointment, using two fingers to keep it off of his palms. He applied even pressure in slow wide circles, trying his hardest not to hurt her.

One could presume the shuttle was being flown at supersonic speeds, but Artemis could hear nothing other than Holly’s sighs as his fingers pressed into her skin. He had never touched anyone so directly before and it felt as if his self was located entirely in the tips of his fingers as they pressed insistently across her back, tense bundles of muscle loosening as relief worked its way through her skin. At that moment, he felt an unbearable tenderness towards Holly, stronger than anything had felt for another person. He could dismiss it as an adverse stress reaction, the product of fatigue and psychological torture. Instead, he sheltered the feeling within himself. It might keep him warm in the times ahead.

“It’s going to be okay, Arty,” she said sleepily. “I’ll figure out something.”

Artemis nodded in agreement. Soon, Holly seemed to drop into sleep. He finished applying the ointment, for it had already been absorbed into her skin. For some reason, his fingers carried the scent of lawn grass and oranges. He wanted to sit up for a while and think about his situation, but he was exhausted. He unbuttoned his dress shirt and placed it lightly over Holly’s bare back. He was larger and could take the slight chill of the cargo area.

He laid on his back, facing up at a narrow strip of LEDs. He was sure that they had both gone more than 24 hours without sleep, and Holly had not eaten for at least that long. His stomach grumbled, unsatisfied with the few slivers of food he forced himself to eat at the Extinctionist banquet. They both would get weaker with time, while Opal’s mind would devise ever greater methods to subsume them.

_What is her plan?_ Artemis wondered. In the past, Opal sought to dispatch her enemies as soon as their roles were complete, but she had kept them around for much longer than necessary. Instead of funneling them towards a theatric execution, she had forced Holly to verbally degrade herself while also engaging an unnatural amount of touching and kissing with them both. The developments astounded Artemis. He could account for the psychological and physical pressure as part of established methods of torture, but the kissing and calling herself ‘Mommy’ was a serious deviation from the professional standards of torturers. It was beyond his understanding, but Opal’s true plan was concealed behind her erratic behavior. That’s where her weaknesses would be revealed.

Before he could think any deeper, he felt a burning weight drop on his chest. He looked down to see the rune etched into him begin to spin, grinding slowly against his nerves. It was a _geas_ activating in response to his thoughts. Even thinking of Opal’s weaknesses was a step too close to rebellion. The pain crossed his pectorals and skirted over his heart before descending to its nadir at his diaphragm and beginning the cycle again. The pain hitched his breath but did no further harm. He closed his eyes, but the pattern seemed to continue forever across his torso.

“What’s happened?” Holly spoke drowsily.

“It’s nothing,” he managed to say. “I may have activated Opal’s spell, but it will pass.”

A hazel eye opened to look at his face and flicked downwards briefly to see the hex circling around his chest.

“You need to clear your head to reset it,” Holly said. “Try telling me a story, it should take your mind off of it.”

Artemis nodded, but he didn’t really have any stories. His little brothers were never satisfied with the ones he tried to tell them, and his father had preferred Irish stories at bedtime, which were completely saturated with _geasa,_ magic, and other such things that would not be escapes from the situation. Remembering the citrus scent that had risen from Holly, he decided to draw from history.

“Many think it impossible to grow oranges in Ireland,” Artemis began. “The climate seems far too unfavorable for it. Citrus trees of all types are notorious for their climatic vulnerability and the Irish winter brings plenty of frost.”

Artemis’s mind was taken back to his early childhood. _He and his father stepping through a field of lightly frozen grass as it crunched underfoot._

“Naturally, adaptations arose. After all, fresh fruit is one of those special pleasures in life, and to my taste, there are fewer fruits better enjoyed fresh than oranges. In the current era, humans satisfy their needs for fruit by plucking them under-ripe from the plant and expending valuable energy send them to market. They ripen in cargo containers, and not on the vine. An utter waste.”

He heard Holly breathing evenly again. Artemis found it ironic that he had still ended up telling a bedtime story.

“How, then, does one obtain oranges much closer to home? I suppose a greenhouse could be used; anything can be grown in an environment of absolute control. Systems now exist to automate every environmental factor within glass walls. On average, it may even save a certain amount of emitted carbon compared to transporting produce, but one has to admit that computerized greenhouses lack a certain symbolic virtue compared to open cultivation. What about the soil? The changing seasons?”

His circle had almost entirely stopped moving, the hex going back into hibernation before his eyes.

“In the 17th and 18th centuries, nobility and aristocrats alike began using what I might call my preferred method. They grew their oranges in large planter pots on their estates, letting them stand free in the summer and spring. When the cold came to their lands, they would move their plants to a specially created building called an orangery. The sun would shine through windows of glazed glass, and stone walls would hold the heat inside throughout the season. If the need arose, a stove might even be lit to keep the frost at bay.”

A comfortable numbness spread throughout his body. Artemis found that his older voice had an almost harmonic quality to it. Talking calmed him, and the subject was a natural source of comfort.

“In the winter, it was quite fashionable to host social events in the orangery. For visitors, moving from the chill of the outdoors into a warmly lit building of stone might have been like stepping into another world. In such an enclosed space, the aroma would no doubt be concentrated within. A most pleasant experience. I have been considering adding such a buildings to the Fowl Estate.”

“Really?” Holly asked. Artemis had thought her asleep.

“Is that unlike me?”

“Who would take care of the trees?”

“I might enjoy the challenge of learning something new,” Artemis said. “Even if it is a very practical application of botany.”

“Mmm,” Holly hummed. “When you have that set up, drop me a line. It’d be worth a surface visa to come and visit, maybe next April.”

“April? Very well, I can send you a message then.” Artemis said. “I’ll even save an orange for you.”

“Just one orange?” Her voice teased him.

“If you visited me earlier in the year when the fruits are in season, I’d let you keep half of the harvest.”

“Now that definitely doesn’t sound like the Artemis Fowl I know.”

Artemis propped himself up on an elbow to face her. “It is no lie. Even if I were down to my last orange, I’d split it with you. You deserve that much, at least.”

\--

From her position in the sealed cockpit of the shuttle, Opal nearly shuddered with glee. She had been watching everything. It seemed to her that the relationship between the two had not weakened, despite everything they had been put through. Through the infrared filter, she even saw them tentatively take each other’s hands through the bars.

She would give them a few hours of that, before disembarking at her preferred blacksite. It was at a high latitude, a place even the most seasoned LEP operatives would not think to search.

Opal Koboi had only performed memory extractions a few times before recent events. In all of the forbidden texts she had consulted, any magic dealing with memory had many warnings written alongside its instructions. She had always considered it strange that books filled with vicious spells of black magic would waste ink on cautioning over a simple procedure.

Opal understood those cautions now. She had been so intrigued by the Mud Man falling onto her doorstep that she had drawn the entirety of his memories within her. Furthermore, she had performed the drain on the LEP Captain at the same time. It was nearly a century of personal experiences taken from two people. Opal believed that she was the first warlock to go so far, and knew for certain that no other pixie could have accomplished the task. But she also recalled the caution that had accompanied her instructions.

_When you approach the raging river of Mind, take care along its embankment. If you wish to drink, you must hold back your thirst. Sip only from that which you may hold in your hands. Only a fool would immerse themselves in the waters of another and attempt to drain them dry._

Opal had dismissed the warning. She found ancient practitioners of magic to be too conservative, holding themselves back at the threshold of true power in fear of harming themselves. She had disregarded all their warnings and taken Holly and Artemis within her and held their unconscious forms in her mind for far too long. She had not considered that a simple spell could be more dangerous than the more complex techniques she had employed for years before then.

_Immersed within the minds of others, you become drawn into the current of their consciousness and become something different from yourself. The practicing magician can remain themselves only by drawing memories slowly and in limited amounts._

Opal Koboi knew that she had the strongest self-identity in the whole world. She was, after all, the _only_ Opal Koboi. The shock had knocked her out for a minute or two, but she believed it had not changed who she was as a person.

In this farcical future her prisoners came from, Opal supposedly would have allied with Cudgeon, of all People, in order to shame Foaly and gain the approval of the Council. Obviously, she could never make that mistake now. Cudgeon was an unbearable sycophant, and his future instability made him even less of a valid choice as criminal partner. Even if she hadn’t seen Holly’s desperate struggle against the B’Wa Kell, Opal would have altered her plan. It was only prudent.

She thought through it a little more as clouds zipped by below her shuttle and her captives remained sleeping. She was alone now, as she always had been. Experiencing Artemis’ journey to become who he was today forced a comparison to her own childhood. There had never been a Butler, a Holly, a Mulch, or even a Foaly. No friends. Only rivals.

_Not that I need any of them,_ Opal reminded herself. _The experiences of the Mud Man have convinced me that I_ _need partnerships that extend beyond a single scheme. I’ve wasted my life manipulating disposable fools._

From Holly, she had seen the mental consequences of using the clone to escape prison. She had practiced for such an eventuality, but the memories Holly had shown her of the aftermath had been concerning.

_Embedding a pituitary gland to the base of my brain? Siding against the People in a final apocalyptic struggle? I may hold an intellectual fascination with Mud People, but never in my right mind would I take such an irreversible action._

Opal knew the memories had not changed her identity. No matter the adaptability of Holly or the intellect of Artemis Fowl, she had not seen her true self in their eyes, only one potential future (a future she was currently in the process of eliminating). It had been painful to see she was capable of such failure, but killing the messengers who brought her this warning was shortsighted. She had been granted two extraordinary subjects along with total knowledge of their minds.

What use would it be disposing of them now? Already the Mud Man was under _geasa._ Holly would soon be placed under her control using the Mud Man as a tool. Once the pair was incapable of threatening her, she could focus fully on the Lower Elements. No more sudden moves for power-- she was Opal Koboi. This world was already hers and it would grant everything to her if she asked nicely. Soon, the fairy People would become friends that could support her goals long into the future. She would take the easy path to victory.


	5. Chapter 5

**Eight Years into the New Future**

Foaly stopped in the middle of typing a command. It was like a wave had just gone through him, and he paused at the sensation. He was in the middle of ordering a deep scan, but he had no idea why. On one of his screens, he saw N⁰1 in the Fowl Estate with a lemur on his head. Butler was in the same room, looking at a completely demolished wardrobe.

“Is everything okay there? Why are you at the Mud Boy’s place?”

N⁰1 slowly pivoted to the screen.

“You mean you don’t know?” N⁰1 asked.

Foaly neighed. “What do you mean?”

N⁰1 made rubbed his head in confusion.

“Does anyone know what they were doing right before this?”

Foaly shook his head, with some trepidation. He could remember yesterday, but his memories of the past hour had been hazy. N⁰1 followed that information to its conclusion

“Where is Artemis Fowl?” N⁰1 asked, breathless with thought.

“That one’s easy,” Foaly said. “I see him in his personal study.”

“How about Holly?”

Foaly had to run a few queries but he found her in the terminal at Tara, filling out paperwork.

“She’s ending a shift right now. Is there some point to you asking about them? Don’t forget you don’t have surface privileges. Why shouldn’t I report this?”

N⁰1 grabbed one of his horns and yanked it around for at least five seconds. It looked like it hurt.

“I’m not dreaming,” he said.

“That’s good to know,” Foaly said. “But that doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that you and a formerly extinct species of lemur are in Fowl Manor.”

Butler gave the computer a suspicious eye and spoke up.

“This reminds me of something eight years ago. It even included that very lemur.”

N⁰1 saw what was coming and interrupted Butler, an action that few were allowed to do.

“Sorry, folks. Sorry.” his voice was shrill as he gathered up the gear in the guest room. “I was practicing my teleport and must have screwed up big time!”

Butler cocked his head, suspicious.

“You know how it is, fellas,” N⁰1 said. “You just want a nice night tinkering with runes in your atelier, then all of a sudden you get teleported thousands of miles to the surface.”

“And look,” N⁰1 pointed. “I screwed up so bad I somehow fabricated an extinct monkey on top of my head!”

N⁰1 pointed to the wardrobe and it reassembled itself, every splinter of wood returning to its right place. He shoved all of Foaly’s tech under one arm and made a show of being flustered.

“Oh boy, Qwan’s gonna kill me for this. Bye, Butler. Give Arty a kiss for me.”

N⁰1 rushed a direct teleport back to the Lower Elements, aiming for Foaly’s lab. It was dangerous, but the threat of causing a time paradox by remaining here was even worse.

He arrived in Foaly’s lab with a

large gust of air. It came from using the displacement method, but misplaced office supplies were preferable to misplaced limbs.

Foaly whinnied and stomped his hooves at the sudden storm of papers and pens.

“N⁰1,” the centaur said calmly. “If you don’t explain all of this in the next five seconds, I swear I’m kicking you back into Limbo.”

“Time travel,” N⁰1 said.

Foaly shut his mouth and then nodded sagely. That’s all it took to convince him. He was one of two people in his class who passed Time Theory, but the complexities of the field had annoyed him to the point that he avoided any time magic more advanced than time stops.

“Okay, I can buy that time travel definitely causes issues. And somehow, Artemis and Holly are involved?”

“ _Were_ involved,” N⁰1 corrected. “We sent them into the past and they changed things there. That means that two sets of them exist, one eight years older than the other. If the younger ones find out about the older ones, there might be some quantum consequences.”

“Oh, but I’m okay?” Foaly asked. “I guess being kept at base has its benefits.”

N⁰1 squinted at Foaly and was about to get angry before his inner voice interjected.

_I’m the only one with memories of the original time travel experience. Foaly doesn’t understand that there could be another copy of Holly and Artemis around. He doesn’t understand that something terrible could be happening to them at this very moment._

“This is going to sound strange,” N⁰1 said, “But hear me out. I’m from a previous edition of this world.”

“Impossible,” Foaly said, shaking his head. “Time is a flat circle. We live in a constantly expanding moment. Time tunnels are only supposed to create loops. Nothing can ever truly change from time travel because it’s like sewing a stitch onto the circle. Come on, dude, the warlock consensus is near-universal on this.”

N⁰1 listened respectfully. He hadn’t read much research and appreciated the perspective. It was completely incorrect, but he needed to know what made up his friend’s false opinion in order to tear it to shreds.

“Sure, we cannot change the past,” N⁰1 said. “But time loops absolutely change the present.”

Foaly crossed his arms. N⁰1 pressed on.

“Let’s say that time is a flat circle; you could say that an extra copy of them was tossed backwards, closer to the center. It’s like throwing pebbles into a pond-- wouldn’t a change on the inside ripple out and touch us on the outside?”

Foaly did the dimensional geometry necessary to evaluate the claim. “D’Arvit.” History had been made.

N⁰1 was powerful enough to rival Bruin Fadda in magical strength. The time loophad stirred up the Time Stream, but his magic energy had held him as a singular person, even as the quantum waves had reformed the entire world.

“Blessed binaries, you really did just perform a dimension-hop,” Foaly said. “How long ago were they sent back?”

N⁰1 counted on his fingers.

“I sent them eight years into the past. I don’t have any memories of this alternate timeline, so you need to tell me if anything strange has happened since then.”

_Well, I met Caballine, the love of my life. Cudgeon tried to frame me during the B’wa Kell uprising. Artemis defeated a mind wipe. Holly saved the Lower Elements from Pip, Kip, and a mesmered Italian geophysicist._

“I don’t know, it’s been pretty great for the last eight years. I’m married and Haven is safer than ever. No one’s even been able to call Julius ‘Beetroot’ recently since Holly has been keeping things clean on the surface. Some say she’s going to be promoted to Major.”

“Did you just say Julius?” N⁰1 asked, feeling a wave of nausea begin to creep up in himself.

“Yeah, why? Is he... not here in your timeline?”

Foaly began to understand the depth of the problem. He took N⁰1’s hesitation to mean that Julius Root was dead in some past reality.

“Where is Opal Koboi?” N⁰1 asked. “Do you have surveillance?”

“Oh, I wish,” Foaly said. “We’ve got a fun little rivalry going over being able to set up snoops on each other. But if you want to see a camera feed, that’s easy.”

Foaly set a news feed to display the public news channel. It looked like there was a Council meeting being held. Strangely, N⁰1 only saw four council members. _Where was the fifth?_

The fifth member joined after a few moments. N⁰1 watched with building anxiety as she walked into frame with balanced steps. Opal Koboi announced herself, smiling sweetly at the council members. Her head was bowed in polite deference as she thanked them for waiting. N⁰1 saw that she was supporting something in front of her with two hands but had no idea what it could be.

“What’s she holding?” N⁰1 asked. “A bomb?”

“What? No, not even close.” Foaly cocked his head.

Councilor Koboi took her seat, sitting slightly back from the table. N⁰1 saw her resting a hand on the swell of her belly. It wasn’t weight gain. It was something bigger. The demon pointed wordlessly to the screen and stammered at Foaly.

“Yeah, she’s got a bun in the oven,” Foaly said. “I guess you could call that a time bomb of sorts.”

“Why didn’t you tell me Opal Koboi was free in the world?” N⁰1 asked. “Doesn’t a delusional sociopath holding public office strike you as strange?”

“Depends on your social media,” Foaly said with a wink. “But I stay off the conspiracy blogs nowadays.”  
  
N⁰1 kicked a nearby wastebasket, which let out a dejected beep in response.

“That’s pretty neat, right?” Foaly said. “The trash can is a FoalyTech SWD-1, it--”

“Listen to me, centaur. That _pixie_ on the screen is a highly dangerous criminal where I come from. She killed Julius Root and orchestrated the B’wa Kell Rebellion.”

N⁰1 stomped his foot to bring Foaly’s attention back.

“Don’t you see? She’s the one who changed. She broke the time loop by taking Artemis and Holly out.”

“Opal Koboi may have been... problematic once, but she’s spent years making up for it,” Foaly argued. “As for killing Artemis and Holly? That’s impossible. Starting with the Fowl Manor crisis, Koboi has saved their lives more than a dozen times. Now that she’s on the Council, she’s their biggest advocate.”

Hearing about this alternate Opal was giving him a headache. N⁰1 felt as if all of his magic power had turned against him.

_I’m getting time sickness. I have to gain my bearings, or I’m going to get spun out into time-space. My memories need to be reinforced with some actual thinking about this situation._

“She’s faking it,” N⁰1 managed to groan. “If she used advanced magic, she could read Holly’s memories and see everything she would need to become famous and loved.”

Foaly scoffed. “She wouldn’t need something that crazy. She’s been adored by the People ever since she announced that her new focus would be on improving fairy fertility. That’s actually a serious concern for the People. I was telling Caballine the other day, we might try...”

N⁰1 had crossed his arms impatiently. “When did Opal announce this big fertility project?”

Foaly feigned a shrug but he caught on to N⁰1’s point.

“Maybe a decade ago, but let me check,” Foaly said, already typing the query.

“Erhm,” he said, looking at the date of the press release.

N⁰1 checked the screen, but he had a feeling he already knew the date.

“She announced her plans 8 years ago, Foaly. That’s the time I sent them to. That’s when they went missing.”

The evidence was all circumstantial, but Foaly found himself convinced. He knew Opal from school, and her sudden ascendance to power never seemed right to him. A shock came as he was forced to reinterpret nearly a decade of his life.

“It all makes sense,” he said. “There’s a ban on medical experimentation, because the Hey-Hey monks believe a 20-year fertility cycle was ordained to us by the gods. If she wanted a breakthrough, all of her research would have to be done above ground, and the only subjects she could use without risking a police investigation would be... kidnapped fugitives.”

The idea disgusted him. From his school days, he knew that Opal held onto to grudges like no one else. Using her rivals as lab rats would have been well within her comfort zone if her sense of control was threatened.

The Opal Koboi they saw on the screen smiled and nodded along to another councilor’s speech. If her new self was all an act, she had kept it up for years without a single sign of breaking. Everyone had accepted that she had changed for the better, even Foaly.

“They’re not dead, right?” Foaly asked. “Your copies of Artemis and Holly.”

“I know they’re not. I don’t know how, but I can feel it.”

N⁰1 calmed down and looked soberly at his stubby fingers and their swirling runes.

“I destroyed an entire world and put my friends in danger,” he said.

Foaly said. “Don’t think that you’re going to face that alone, demon. I’m not going to let Opal _or_ the Time Stream win this time.”

He cracked his knuckles and got to typing. He needed to find where Opal might keep two research subjects...


	6. E

Despite her hopes about friendship, Opal was still a cautious pixie. She gassed her sleeping subjects on arrival to her lab to keep them orderly and unloaded them directly from the shuttle into their own containment area. The site was totally fabricated using Koboi Construction drones of her own design. Uncharitably, their cell could be described as a square pit dug into the ground, although Opal considered it to be far more advanced. Hours before her arrival, an initial cavity was excavated several meters downwards into the floor, with a floor space that measured wider on each side.

For the residents of the cell, it would seem like they were in a cube at half height. They would not be aware that their upstairs neighbor would be Opal within her own, much more luxurious hemicube. Of course, she hadn’t got around to the furnishing quite yet. That would have to wait for her return to the Lower Elements.

For her captives, she had coated three of their walls in a soft polymer that would prevent them from doing any serious harm to themselves. The fourth wall, was a one-way viewing window that she could descend a set of steps down to view. It was important that they had a visible reminder that they were being watched at all times.

She could enter through the reflective wall. Of course, her drones had already set up DNA cannons in the alcoves of the room so that any attempt to escape or interfere with her could be quickly dealt with.

Thinking ahead to situations where she might want to limit contact with her guests, Opal had included a delivery drawer that she or her robots could use. First on her delivery schedule was food and water, but she was still in the process of planning a system of material incentives that would have Artemis and Holly eating out of her hands and obeying her instructions.

After ensuring that the Koboi Constructor models had accurately completed their building plans, Opal decided she would take a nap. She needed her beauty rest, especially now that she wouldn’t be relying on brain fluids from the exotic animals of the world.

Under normal conditions, she would have been annoyed that she did not have access to a better bed, but without Merv and Scant, there was no one she could blame but herself. She forgave herself, and looked forward to what could be done with Holly and the Mud Man.

She woke after a few hours to her security system notifying her that Holly was awake and active. Opal showered with rapidly heated icemelt and belted a simple robe around her waist. Who were these pit-dwellers to judge her choice of fashion?

Opal strolled into their enclosure, feeling quite confident. Then she saw Holly Short sending a roundhouse kick at her head. Unfortunately for the elf, a DNA cannon had been tracking Holly, preparing a blast of stun energy the instant it identified her fighting stance. The bolt made impact a fraction of a second before the kick would have connected, and Holly seized up and fell to the ground.

“Holly!” Opal said, letting the genuine hurt leak through her voice. “I wanted to start over as friends, I really did. Why can’t we have a little civility between us two?”

Holly was still wearing Artemis’ clothes, the jacket as a skirt and the shirt on her shoulders, letting Opal see her bare chest heaving. The cannons had been set to a low level, so Holly could speak.

“You want civility? Shut down your defenses, Koboi. I’ll show you some civility.”

Opal sighed and waved her hand, sending the stunned elf hurdling through the air and into the wall. The wall was shock absorbent, but the act was forceful enough to make her point.

Artemis had woken up by now and was rushing to Holly’s side. He turned to Opal with an active hate in his eye.

“There was no call for that,” he said. “You lost control. Instability like that leaves you weak.”

“Me? Unstable?” Opal asked incredulously. “She attacked me, so I had to remind her why she shouldn’t do that. It’s very simple, Mud Boy. It’s a matter of control.”

Artemis stood, shaking his head.

“If you had control, you would have no need to assert it over us so frequently. Face it, Koboi, you lack the ability to truly restrict us. If we cannot return to our time, we could destabilize the fabric of Time itself.”

Opal checked her own watch while Artemis talked. He always needed his little speeches and last-minute bluffs, but she knew from his own memories that bluffs could only be the result of an absolute lack of strategic advantages. She needed to destroy his false confidence in the Time Stream, just as she had destroyed Holly’s elfin confidence in magic. She needed to demonstrate control in an undeniable way.

Opal pointed a finger at him. “Be quiet, Arty.”

She pulled Holly to her feet and placed her in physical stasis. The elf had recovered, likely just playing possum in an attempt a second attack. _The upcoming demonstration should remind them of what my penalties will include._

“Arty, you should unbutton your pants.”

Artemis successfully resisted the command. He knew what Opal was attempting to do, even though his rune had already begun applying pain and heat directly over his heart. Opal allowed the rune to automatically proceed this time. She could adjust Artemis’ body with her own hands. She stepped behind him, guiding his hips so that they were about level with Holly frozen face.

“Don’t worry, Arty, you won’t be touching Holly for this experience. She just has to watch. You’re the Mud Boy she loves to kiss, and she needs to see what happens when no one listens to Mommy.”

Unable to prevent their movement, Artemis’s hands descended to his waist. He undid the button of his slacks and then stopped. Opal became impatient and pulled down his zipper for him, letting the dark fabric of his pants slip off his narrow frame and pool around his ankles.

Holly looked on, frozen, mere centimeters away. The stasis spell allowed her eyes to shake in their sockets, but Opal saw the eyes fight to stay focused on her, and not the crotch of the man in front of her. Either Holly was listening to the whims of her altered body or she had more than a passing interest in the dimensions of her Mud Man.

“It’s okay to watch, Poppy,” Opal said, using the nickname the girls in the Short family had traditionally held.

Opal had crossed another line. It was a secret Holly had kept to herself and close friends, a reminder of her parents. Her pupils widened and then constricted to narrow violent points when she heard Opal steal it, the stasis spell allowing no other movement.

“Remove your boxers, Arty.”

He did so slowly, his resistance burned out. Opal watched with a grin as red silk joined the dark wool on the floor. Artemis stepped out of his clothes, now made naked except for the hex emblazoned on his front. Opal placed a cold hand on his ankle and began to move it up his leg. Looking up, she could see his expression waver as she moved her hand upwards past his knee and onto his thigh. She paused, running her hands along his legs as she spoke to Holly.  
  
“I was expecting more hair. What do you think, Holly?”

Holly’s lips were locked shut in stasis, but she was clearly attempting to make up for that as her face contorted into several different forms of anger.

“How about _this,_ ” Opal said, her hand shooting to grab Artemis’s flaccid dick. “I hope that’s just cold shrinkage, or your Mud Boy here ranks below the average pixie.”

Opal stroked the dick, feeling blood flow between her fingers and into veins. It stiffened and lengthened with each stroke. Human males had a fortunate tendency to _rise_ to any occasion they were called for. Once he had gotten most of the way to a full erection, the length seemed suitable for her purposes, if not much more. Even better, he was not circumcised, so she could go for a dramatic reveal as she pulled his foreskin back, revealing his glistening cockhead.

“Almost makes your mouth water, doesn’t it?” Opal said. “You both might like it if you tried to kiss Arty right there.”

Ignoring her elf’s baleful glare, Opal switched over to the left of Artemis so she could keep stroking him with her dominant hand. She used a peculiar overhand stroke that started at his base and pulled downwards towards Holly, who was forced to stand in front of him. Her grip started strong at his root but lessened in strength as she got towards the tip, pulling it downwards so that Holly’s warm breath reached the sensitive tip of Arty’s dick.

Opal looked up to see Artemis’s face deeply flushed. His thin lips were stuck grimacing as he held back, his dick stiff like wood. It was time for the tiniest of breaks. Opal let go of his dick and it bounced, curved to point at the ceiling.

“Doing great, Arty,” Opal said. “But I don’t think Holly is enjoying this as much as you. Why don’t you take her clothes off for me?”

Holly growled deep in her throat, beyond where the stasis spell reached. That very resistance was what Opal was targeting.

“Unless Captain Short would like to remove her clothes willingly so Arty can masturbate to the sight of her.”

Opal let the spell up over Holly’s head just to hear her response.

“When I get free, I’m going to--”

She closed her fist again and Holly’s teeth slammed into each other, silenced again.

“Arty, strip this elf. I’m not asking.”

Artemis nodded.

“Indeed,” he said, pulling his own shirt off of Holly’s shoulders and tossing it to the pile of clothes behind him.

He yanked at the knot she had tied in his jacket to keep it on, but it was too tight. Using a strength he had never known in himself, Artemis tore the jacket at its seams. Flutters of torn suit fabric flew into the air and Holly was pulled back and forth by her hips. When he was done, he raised into a crouch, assuming the pose they had held before, his cock still standing at attention.

“You must have liked that,” Opal remarked. “Well, don’t let me hold you back. Masturbate to the elf in front of you, Artemis, but you may come only once I give you the command.”

Artemis did as he was instructed, his hand taking its grip with an instinctual ease. The longer the spell was kept active over him, the less he could influence what was happening. Once she returned the hex to its more passive state, he would immediately be returned to self-control, with complete memory of everything that happened. For now, though, Artemis was locked behind her commands.

The Mud Man who had defeated her in the past was now jacking off over the face of his most trusted accomplice like some kind of debased animal. Opal could see him taking in every exquisite detail of Holly. Her eyes and face were beautiful in their discomfited fury. Her breasts heaved with anxious breaths, and her body was covered in a sheen of sweat from struggling against the spell that bound her. These things likely would have distressed a truly conscious Artemis, but his body evaluated the visual stimulation without much judgment. Whatever his perception, his fist kept pumping over his dick in an unrelenting fury all the way until he was on the verge of orgasm.

“Wait until I tell you, Arty,” Opal said, lending her own hand once he had stopped his own. “We want Holly to be ready.”

She stroked Artemis with one hand and used the other to force Holly’s face closer. Faster and faster, she kept his cock aimed downwards, pushing the elf’s head until the cockhead was tapping her right between her eyebrows, leaving a sticky patch behind. When Opal felt Artemis’s cock jump in her hands, she knew he was at his absolute limit. Opal stopped stroking and only used her hand to aim his dick downwards at Holly’s face.

“Come,” Opal ordered him. “Come, you filthy Mud Man.”

Artemis’s knees almost buckled as he was allowed to orgasm. He let out a jet of cum that almost seemed to spray out onto Holly’s face with force, landing across her brow and into her hair. He made a breathless groan as he continued to cum, with Opal directing each shot so that it would drip over Holly’s cheeks, her nose, and especially over her tightly closed lips. As Artemis’s orgasm faded, Opal pulled tightly at his semi-hard length to milk a few last droplets onto Holly’s pointed elfin ears, knowing they would be sensitive. She let Artemis collapse onto his rear in fuzzy exhaustion and admired her handiwork.

Holly Short’s face was covered in Mud Man come. It dripped off her brow and over her cheeks to her chin, where a few drops splattered involuntarily to her chest. Opal used her fingers to scoop some away from Holly’s eyes.

“Don’t say I never gave you anything,” Opal said, then forced Holly’s mouth open to stick spunk covered fingers directly on her tongue, rubbing her fingers across her tastebuds to deposit it before shutting her mouth close again.

In a brief fit of curiosity, Opal tasted her fingers, slick with elf saliva and human come. It forced her to face away from Holly as a strange sense of euphoria gripped her. The taste of the two united in her had brought a sudden arousal in her-- she noticed her body temperature jump by a degree and she felt a certain sense of need coiling at the base of her belly

_It seems I prefer this sort of thing,_ Opal thought. The Mud Man’s seed didn’t taste all that bad either, especially cut through with Holly’s citric taste. It gave her a newfound affection for her captives. She almost thought about letting Holly free of her bonds to clean herself up, but ultimately decided differently.

“Arty, be a dear and restrain Holly for a few minutes after I’ve left. Mommy is going shopping.”

Opal decided to rub the remnants of the strong-smelling cum into Holly’s ears before she left, knowing that her captives wouldn’t be able to bathe until she came back. She intended this lesson to set in by keeping them sullied for as long as possible...

The controlled Artemis hooked his arms together at the back of Holly’s neck. It must have been a move his Butler had taught him, and he doubled its effectiveness by forcing Holly to the ground and hunching over her, using his legs and weight to pressure her. If Holly had been freed before Artemis attempted the move, it wouldn’t have worked, but Opal knew the hold would work for long enough. Until she escaped, Holly would be trapped under him, his weight over her.

She left the two alone behind walls of stone. Besides their naked forms twisted into each other, the only other thing near them was their pile of old, grimy clothes. She committed the sight to memory-- it would be a long shuttle flight back to Haven, and she could use some inspiration


	7. Chapter 7

As soon as Opal had disappeared, Holly felt the stasis spell begin to weaken. At a certain point, she knew she could break it with enough force.

“D’Arvit,” she screamed, and used her rage and anger to free herself up, putting all of her force into her body to twist it sideways and jam her elbow into Artemis’s unguarded ribcage. He let go of his hold on her, and Holly took the opportunity to kick one leg out from under him. She followed that up with a knuckle to his forehead to keep him under until his hex was gone.

“D’Arvit,” she said again, punching the floor. She didn’t even feel the impact.

She spotted the mirrored wall that had opened to allow Opal through. It was her next target. She got into a ready position and bolted directly at it, leaping into the air and kicking out with a straightened leg so that her heel would smash. It made solid contact, but the material didn’t yield, feeling more like thick plastic than reflective metal. _If the entrance wasn’t vulnerable, she would have to try one of the other walls._

She went to the wall Opal had thrown her against. It was covered in a rigid foam material that would not peel away when she picked at it. She tried punching it. It hurt, but the pain was less important than venting her frustration.

“D’Arvit,” she cursed, and then struck the wall again. She punched and cursed again and again, enjoying the stinging feeling and the soreness in her first that built as she kept striking at the thinly padded surface. She saw the dent she made recover just as quickly each time, even as the skin over her knuckles began to split and red droplets of blood left stains. She brought herself to a halt before she did any lasting damage, fighting to control herself.

“Holly?” Artemis said. “What happened-- Oh God.”

Artemis was reacting to her sullied face. Holly knew. It was supposed to take some time for memories to resurface after being controlled, but he could make all the conclusions that he needed right away. His first move was to get his underwear on. As he got up, he winced and put his hands to his aching side.

“I’m sorry for that,” Holly said. “I had to get you off me.”

Artemis coughed awkwardly. Holly knew that the control hex didn’t erase memory so much as create a layer of surrealism. The effect was so strong that it could get in the way of LEP investigations. It was probably very difficult for Artemis to process what had happened.

“The violence was perfectly understandable,” he said. “I apologize for not being able to stop myself.”

With the jacket in tatters, Holly was stuck using Artemis’s shirt as a makeshift loincloth. She was too tired to find some way to keep her breasts covered and instead started to daub at her face with pieces of the torn jacket, trying to get his strong-smelling stuff off of her before it dried any further. She didn’t want to remind herself who it came from and how it got there.

“Don’t apologize, Arty, I know what a control hex is like. Unless you train your body, you won’t be able to fight it. Even when someone manages to resist, there’s always some time limit. It’s not your fault that Opal hijacked you.”

“Nevertheless, I am guilty of supplying her with the materials necessary for her actions,” Artemis said.

He took a crouching position, his feet far apart.

“We don’t have much time,” he said, gesturing to the space between his legs. “If you can cause enough damage, I doubt Opal will be able to repair my functions when she returns.”

Holly took another look at Artemis and his strange pose. When she caught sight of his grim face, she realized what he was asking for. It was an unprecedented display of desperation from him.  
  


“Artemis. You’re not thinking clearly,” she said. “You know she’s watching us right now, and if she isn’t, her systems are. If I went to kick you in your gonads, I’d just be taking another stun round for no reason.”

Artemis frowned in the way he did whenever his plans encountered obstacles. He returned to his normal standing posture, a back held ramrod-straight not out of discipline, but out of an intellectual pride.

“You are right. I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said. “This is... challenging for me.”

“Oh yeah?” Holly said, before spitting on another scrap of fabric and using it to wipe her lips off. “Tell me more.”

Artemis displayed his ability to selectively process sarcasm and continued to explain himself.

“I didn’t realize the extent of Opal’s plans. I thought all of this ‘Mommy’ business was just some kind of affectation she was using to taunt us before she placed us in another pit full of trolls or B’wa Kell gangsters. In such a situation, my control hex would only hinder you some small amount.”

“You underestimated her willingness to get her own hands dirty,” Holly said. “You didn’t think of this Opal as a new version. Maybe you didn’t see her turn Merv, Scant and a hallway full of rare animals into dust. Or maybe you underestimated how much of a taboo kissing Mud Men is.”

She turned her head this way and that, letting Artemis take a look. She was past her shame at this point, she just wanted to be clean.

“Is there anything left?” Holly asked. She could still smell plenty of cum but most of it had dried or been rubbed off.

Artemis cleared his throat.

“Yes, I see some left on your hair and ears, and a little patch on your nose.”

Holly wiped until they were gone. It was only a little better than nothing. Her rage was still there. She had been cautioned against giving into anger as a youth. It apparently came from her father’s side of the family, who often liked to claim they were descended from the Berserkers of old. Remembering her heritage reminded her of what was really at stake.

_My... pride._

“Okay, Arty, I’ve got a plan,” she said. “One that won’t even set off your hex.”

“I would be grateful to hear it,” he said, taking a seat on the floor.

“It should be clear by now that Opal is using us against each other. I think her plan was to get you under control first.”

“That fits well with my own hypothesis,” Artemis said. “She still prefers to call me Mud Boy. I may be a mere stepping stone for her to get to you.”

The rune on his chest started moving slowly. Holly knew she needed to stop it before it went any further.

“I don’t think we should fight her,” she said. “With you under the hex, the best I could do right now is a solo escape. But even if I made it out of here, could I convince the Council not to imprison me for time traveling? Would they even rescue you? Would they take my word over Opal’s? It’s too much to risk right now.”

“The spell compels me to agree with you,” Artemis said. “My judgment is not to be trusted here.”

“Then trust me,” Holly said. “If we keep fighting, I know Opal will violently destroy everything about us. She’ll ruin everything about our partnership.”

“I thought that I had ruined that myself when I tricked you into helping me come back in time.”

“Not entirely,” Holly said. “Arty, you messed up, but I forgave you. I’m not happy about anything that’s happened since, but we’re both alive and relatively sane at this moment. We need to stay like that for as long as possible, because we’ve missed the short way home.”

She stepped closer to him and cupped his cheek with one hand.

“I’m not happy about any of this, but there’s no one else I’d want with me through this situation than you.”

Artemis smiled in spite of himself.

“Thank you, Holly. It’s more than I deserve. I could not even save my mother. Who knows what Mulch has done with JayJay by now?”

Holly stepped back.

“Jayjay got the last of N⁰1’s magic from me. If Mulch followed my instructions, the lemur should have made the return journey when the portal closed.”

Artemis sighed, the relief cascading through his body like a sob.

“Our original mission is complete. It’s a game of survival for us now, Arty. We need to do whatever it takes to get through it. Right now, that means doing nothing but gather information.”

Artemis considered the proposition.

“This could be exactly what Opal wants,” he said. “By not resisting, we make the full breadth of her plans viable. If her madness takes a sudden turn, we might find ourselves disarmed in front of her at the moment she decides to kill us.”

“Yeah, but she’s given up on using animals to enhance your magic,” Holly said. “Your hex won’t fade, but I’ll get freer as she loses her enhancements. At some point, she’ll be powerless except for her technology.”

_Although we always needed our own friends to help us out against her tech before._ Holly thought.

Artemis closed his eyes for a brief second and nodded.

“I will trust you on this, Holly,” he said, then stuck his hand out.

“Good,” she said, shaking his hand. “I told you I’d come up with something.”

She hugged his head closer to her and planted a quick kiss on his forehead. Artemis touched the spot in disbelief.

“My first act of ‘resistance’,” Holly explained.

\--

Koboi Industries was abuzz with activity. Opal was making a surprise onsite visit and the staff had only minutes to prepare. Shamagh Sool, responsible for building operations, commanded his custodial staff as if they were engaged in a life-and-death battle.

“Get those vacuums moving, people! We need this shuttle bay cleaner than a dwarven dinnerplate, or I can assure you none of us will have a job tomorrow.”

He pointed at a pair of idle fairies.

“You two! Stop flirting with each other and bring Miss Koboi’s Monday carpet. Remember, it’s the _Monday_ carpet. Anything else and we’re all toast.”

The carpet team almost made it in time. The pad gate slid open with predictable Koboi effectiveness as Opal herself descended from above in her custom shuttle. The custodians dove sideways just before the thrusters would have fried them. Shamagh Sool breathed a side of relief. No fatalities, yet.

“Roll the carpet!” he told the carpet crew. “It’s not over yet.”

United by a common purpose, the two carpetbearers (who had not met each other before that day and definitely had _not_ been flirting) managed to coordinate with each other and send the bulky roll out towards the landing pad in a straight line. The shuttle automatically lowered its stairs on the side to meet it, and everything seemed perfect. That was, until the workers saw the holes eaten in the carpet. Some kind of pest had gotten into storage.

“By all that glitters!” Shamagh said. “I’m dreaming. I have to be.”

In the few moments it took for Shamagh to make his peace with Danu, Opal exited her craft and was halfway down the carpeted aisle. If she noticed the holes in her favorite carpet, she made no sign of it.

“Stop gawking, Sool,” Opal commanded.

“Yes, Miss Koboi.” He regained his composure.

“Get me a print copy of the Koboi Consolidated Catalog, the most recent edition you can find,” she commanded.

“Right away, Miss Koboi,” Shamagh said, feeling cold sweat drip down his back. Wherever Koboi had gone for her brief sabbatical, she seemed now to have returned as an entirely different pixie.

Opal herself was aware of no changes other than a substantial improvement in her mood, but plotting always made her upbeat. As she strode through the hallways of Koboi Industries, she saw hesitant faces poking out from between blinds and around corners. She hadn’t made a visit in weeks, and her sudden appearance had everyone believing there was about to be a sudden bureaucratic massacre of staff. They were deeply mistaken.

Once in her top-floor office, Koboi waved her attendants away. She could serve herself until the print catalog arrived. Walking was tough on pixies, and Opal was in the middle of downing a chilled bottle from her personal reserve of glacier water when one of her attendants knocked at the door. It was the sprite, one of the replacements she had ordered after her ill-fated experiment with a dwarf secretary.

There was no amount of scrubbing that would make the earth-eaters clean, and as soon as Opal saw her dwarf attempt to pass gas surreptitiously, she ordered her thrown headfirst into the compost heap and out of her employ entirely (the dwarf actually quite enjoyed her snack, and highly recommended Koboi Industries to her friends). Although the vanity of sprites surpassed even that of pixies, the hygiene situation was infinitely improved.

“Your catalog, Madam,” the sprite said, placing the book gingerly on the desk.

Opal started turning the pages of giant volume in a great rush. She was using a print copy to make sure that no digital traces would exist of her search, and she was going with Koboi Furnishment’s rather industrial selection to cover her tracks.

She kept mental note of the things she would demand just before she left, flipping through the cheap pages of the catalog and scanning the pictures with her eyes. She reminded herself to get refills on polymer before she left, too, in case she had more construction ideas.

Her focus was broken once she noticed her visiting sprite hadn’t left. She was looking out at the skyline of Haven through the wide window high up on the wall. It offered only a single strip to see through for the purposes of security, but this bumpkin was still engrossed with the view.

“Why are you still here?” Opal said, rolling her eyes. This sprite wasn’t worth a more forceful rebuke.

“I’ve never seen the view before, ma’am,” the sprite answered truthfully. She had a country voice that made it seem like she had come from one of the last fairy outposts.

“Tell me your name, sprite,” Opal said.

“They call me Lorelei, ma’am.”

“Lorelei, you have maybe seven seconds before I throw you out of that window. I won’t be responsible for what happens to you when my countdown is over.”

The sprite merely cocked her head at the threat.

“Is this like that thing with the dwarf?” Lorelei asked, wide blue eyes crossed in confusion. “Don’t worry, ma’am, I can fly.”

Opal put her head in her hands. She could destroy the hayseed in front of her easily, but she also needed to keep a close eye on her magic usage until she was finished cultivating her new source. Not to mention all of the cover up a murder.

“Leave. Now.” Opal let the anger show in her voice.

Instantly, Lorelei got the message, and backed out of the room. Opal didn’t have the time to develop a grudge. She had to get back of setting up her new hideout. For her room, burgundy would give a dominant impression. For _their_ room, they would be getting everything in black. Or to be more accurate: charcoal. It was as close as Koboi Industries could provide.

After picking up resources at Koboi Industries, it would also be necessary to make a stop on the surface. She needed supplies for blood magic, and the black market didn’t come cheap.


	8. Chapter 8

Artemis knocked on the mirrored surface in front of him, seeing nothing but his shimmering reflection as the material vibrated. The rune on his chest glowed red and he forced himself to repeat a mantra of his own making.

_I do not want to escape. I do not want Holly to escape. I want to listen to Opal._

By repeating it in his head a few times, Artemis deactivated the hex before it truly began to hurt. It came at the cost of his own self-respect.

Holly looked up from the corner she was lying in. The burn across her back was still healing, but it no longer actively hurt. She was focused on just conserving her energy.

“Give it a rest,” she said. “Leave that kind of thing to me.”

“If you insist.” Artemis sighed, taking his own position in the corner parallel to hers.  
  
He had already composed the first act of a new opera within his head, and was trying without much success to develop the libretto alongside it. The vast amount of free time he had now was distracting him, and he could not help but have his thoughts drawn to the world outside.

At some point, he was sure that they had passed the deadline for the return to the future, and homesickness had begun to overwhelm him. He wanted to capture that level of pathos in the words to his opera, but it was not going well.

“If you’re bored, you have time to do some exercises,” Holly said. Artemis was staring into his own corner, but her voice was enough to bring him back around.

“Exercises?” Artemis scoffed. “I presented my case to you already. Strengthening my body is a step too far towards conciliation with our captor. Who knows if you’d be able to overpower me if we were made to fight?”

Holly looked at him with raised eyebrows.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but it would take three decades of training before you could do _anything_ to me in a one-on-one situation.”

“Unless, of course, Opal was involved and employing magic against you,” Artemis said.

Holly went a deeper shade of red with anger.

“We’re not talking about Opal, here,” she said. “We’re talking about you and me. I want you to exercise because I want you at full strength. Plus, with that hex on your chest, you need to be in top condition if you don’t want a heart attack before your fiftieth birthday.”

Artemis lifted his hands in surrender. He could not ignore her pleas in such a situation. They were all each other had.

“Very well, Holly. You’ve convinced me. What should we start with?”

“Let’s start with crunches,” she said. “A strong core is a good first step. Then we’ll run some fighting forms.”

Artemis struggled his way through the crunches, his strength held back by a lack of food. They were supplied bone-chillingly cold water from a hovering drone, but no food had arrived ever since their arrival. He got up to his feet, craving caviar but receiving only kicking instructions.

“This part is all about getting balance on the back leg,” Holly was saying. “Once we get you in ‘ _tipsy gnome’_ stance, you can keep sending kicks out while balanced on your back foot.”

Once Artemis gained his balance, he was supposed to practice the same kick again and again. It made no sense to him.

“But how could this be useful?” Artemis said. “Butler rarely used kicks when he had cause to fight someone.”

Holly stopped her own kicking for a moment to lecture Artemis, smoothing down the shirt she was wearing around her waist so it settled.

“Butler is gigantic and has years of experience fighting other dangerous men. He’s earned the right to decide how to fight. Believe me when I say you need kicks to manage the size imbalance when you’re on the defense.”

“Defense? Bold of you to assume I would not be the aggressor in this hypothetical fight.”

Holly knew he would crack wise; it was his go-to coping mechanism when plotting was out of the option.

“Arty, let’s be real here, I’m not trying to turn you into a martial arts master, just give you the ability to protect yourself.”

“I know,” Artemis said. “And I do agree with the general principle, but the kick appears to be a significant vulnerability to me. What if I am intercepted and my leg is grabbed?”

Holly stopped to think. In the LEP Academy, they used practical demonstrations, but Artemis was more than 60 centimeters feet higher than her and she didn’t immediately know how to make it work.

“Get on your knees, I’ll show you,” Holly said.

With some hesitation, Artemis knelt, feeling his abdominal muscles aching as he tightened his torso and tried to match his view to the level of Holly’s head.

“You have to catch my foot at the ankle,” she said. “That’s where it’s easiest.”

She got a little closer and slowly extended her foot out to Artemis’s left side. He cradled her ankle with his hand.

“No, hook an arm around it, like you’re trying to lock me in.”

He adjusted his grip, trying to ignore the texture of Holly’s sole as it tickled his bare ribcage. With one leg up, her body was almost completely exposed. Artemis forced himself to be a gentleman and keep his eyes to himself.

“The go-to move when your heel is caught is to turn while pulling your foot out. If you do it quick enough, it’ll get you clear of their range.”

Holly demonstrated the move with a smooth pivot on her free leg, pulling her leg out of his grasp with the force of her body. Even if Artemis had tried, he didn’t know if he could have prevented her foot from moving in his hold.

“And just for fun, I’ll show you a more aggressive counter. Don’t try this one at home.”

She kicked her leg out again for Artemis to catch, and this time he couldn’t prevent himself from seeing everything between Holly’s legs. She followed his gaze to see where he was looking.

“Enjoying the view?” she asked. She tried to pull her foot back without turning, but Artemis tightened his grasp.

“Oh, okay,” Holly said teasingly. “I can show you an even harder version too, if you want it so bad.”

Instead of turning away, she surged towards Artemis. Even though he had her leg gripped at the ankle, Holly bent and then turned so that her knee was pressing down into his lap, closing the distance between them. In close range, she threw a hooked arm around his head and pulled him into a headlock. He was forced into her chest and couldn’t hold onto her leg anymore.

“There’s an alternate version of escaping a heel-catch where you just punch someone,” Holly said, “But that isn’t really my thing.”

They were sweaty from exercise, and hadn’t washed for days, so Artemis had the distinct sensation of being pulled into Holly’s scent while he felt something smooth pressing against his cheek. He breathed her in-- a scent somewhere between citrus and the salt-grass that grew by the beach near his home.

“Now is about the time that you’re supposed to tap out,” she said. “You do know how to tap out, right?”

Artemis chose not to react. Even if it was a fighting demonstration, their current status was closer to an embrace and he found himself unable to turn down the hug. He was not a trained warrior with years of experience.

Even with all of his intelligence, he was a very limited adult, and had become exhausted by continual attempts to contain his despair. Pressed against Holly, he felt secure. She meant so much to him, but he had done nothing but abuse that connection and demean her through Opal’s control of his body.

“Wait, do you... like this?” Holly said, sounding more surprised than estranged. Artemis felt tears well in his eyes, carried onto her chest by their close contact. Holly let up on the headlock a little, returning the hug.

“It’s going to be all right, Arty,” Holly lied, stroking his hair.

He cried in silence for a few more seconds and then managed to close off the pit of sorrow that had grown within him. He turned his head to the side so that their hug would be closer.

Holly breathed in sharply at his stubble. “That tickles.”

“Oh.”

“You know, you can ask for a hug any time you want.”

Artemis nodded, silently. He didn’t trust his voice enough to speak. He could hardly trust his mind, either. By reaching into his mind and reading the book of his life, Opal had dealt a serious injury to Artemis. He prided his ability to control information and determine privacy; his technological expertise was direct proof of that.

More than cultural pursuits, he had long sought to cover his insecurities through layers of defenses. Physical barriers and mental barriers alike had been invalidated by Opal’s magic, marked most visibly in the cursed geometry burned into his skin.

_If only I had been able to gain an advantage earlier. If I could have forced an escape of Opal’s lab before Holly came for me, we could have avoided all of this. But I cannot waste time on imagining any longer. I need to consider the long-term implications of_ this _reality._

“Thank you,” Artemis said, wiping his eyes as the embrace ended. “My mind feels clear now.”

Holly was still balanced on one knee in his lap. She got to her feet, the pale patch fading from her skin where his face had been. Without the surge of emotion, their proximity became more awkward and Holly backed away.

“Good work,” she said. “Let’s do some stretching to finish up and we can get back to staring at the walls.”

An entrance opened up in the mirror and Opal strolled in, followed by her construction bots. Artemis hadn’t even heard the shuttle arrive. but it seemed Opal was back after her trip to Haven.

“Mommy’s home,” she announced. “How have my guests been?”


	9. Chapter 9

Artemis was not expecting her return so soon. Clearly, she wasn’t going rely solely on deprivation techniques, so he had to rethink his approach.

“We’ve been coping,” Holly said in a neutral tone and adding nothing further.

“Ah yes, I saw you coping all over the Mud Boy just a few moments ago,” Opal said, directing her robots around the cell. “But never mind that. I’m back from town for a while, and I’ve brought presents.”

“Oh, goody,” Artemis said halfheartedly.

Opal ignored his attempts to bother her.

“I don’t think I could handle watching you both urinate in a drain for years to come, so I’ve decided to set up a bathroom, free of charge.”

“How generous,” Artemis said, again sounding bored and uninterested. Opal gave him a fierce glare this time before continuing.

“I’ve also brought lunch from Haven. As long as this good behavior continues, you’ll receive meals on a regular schedule.”

“Hoo-ray.” Artemis’s voice interrupted, again made deliberately cheerless.

It was a step too far for his jailor. Opal shut him up by closing her hand and forced him back to his knees.

“I don’t know your game, Mud Boy, but don’t think you can force me to hurt you. Mommy’s too nice to do that.”

Opal’s drones set a cheap wooden table in the middle of the cell and dropped two chairs alongside it. She took one and gestured for Holly to take the other.

Opal crossed her legs and leaned back in her chair. “Arty gets the floor because he’s been a bad boy.”

Privacy walls went up in the opposite corner as the drones constructed the newest room, and Opal took out boxes of food catered from one of Downtown Haven’s top lunch spots. Holly recognized the name. It had been her go-to when she was on duty. Opal had drawn it from her memories.

“So... what do you say...?” Opal asked.

“Thanks, Opal,” Holly said, letting her hunger do all the acting for her.

“You’re very welcome, pal.”

Holly grimaced. “Could we give Artemis some?”

“Oh, he’ll eat later,” Opal said, with a wink that suggested volumes.

As the two fairies started with a salad, Artemis realized what Opal had meant only once he heard the compulsive whisper in his head.

_Go under the table_ , it commanded him. He obeyed, crawling on his hands. It was barely large enough to cover him, and only tall enough to let him through if he forced himself closer to his knees.

_Turn to face Captain Short. Place your hands behind your back. Place your head between her legs._

Artemis followed the instructions perfectly, his ears brushing the insides of Holly’s thighs as he rested his chin on her wooden seat.

Opal enjoyed watching Holly feign indifference as Artemis carried out his instructions.

“Is something the matter? Do you like the food?”

“It’s my favorite,” Holly said. “You know this.”

It was no lie. The main entree would be grilled eggplant, and Holly had ordered it from that restaurant for years.

“I’ve never been one for aubergine,” Opal said, spearing a slice on a wooden fork. “But this is exactly like Mom’s recipe, isn’t it?”

Holly almost spit out her mouthful. “That’s my mother, Opal. Not yours.”

Opal shrugged, “Yours, mine, his, what’s the difference? I’m all the mother you need now.”

Artemis was ordered to lean further forward, his tongue extended, until his tongue finally touched Holly under the table. He tasted salt and felt soft hair against his tongue and realized he had contacted her mound. She was sitting strangely upright, so he couldn’t fulfill the command sent to him that told him to ‘lick that elf’s pussy’. Opal must have been aware of that, because she was the next to speak.

“Holly, would you mind sitting further back in your chair?”

“Why?” Holly asked innocently, batting her eyes like she had seen Lili Frond do a thousand times, while Artemis tried to nose closer to her pussy. She was hiding her reaction well.

Opal decided to keep the pretense of their friendly lunch going.

“You don’t have to sit back if you don’t want to.”

Holly nodded and remained sitting like she was, but a bead of sweat had formed by her temple in anticipation.

_Grab her legs,_ Opal ordered Artemis. _You’re going to eat Holly out for me._

His arms slipped under her legs and his hands came up over the top of her inner thighs, locking her tight over him. He pulled on her legs gently until she was seated fully on her rear, fully exposed with her ankles over his hunched shoulders.

He stuck the tip of his tongue out hesitantly and ran it up Holly’s slit, pressing lightly between her inner lips and finding her taste extremely tart, almost like a battery. Artemis felt a shock pass through him, brought on by a body that would not allow him to interfere with that was happening. He gave a second, deeper lap into her, feeling Holly’s thighs tighten involuntarily around his head, the firm strength of her muscles holding him in place. He wanted to look up at her, but the table was in the way.

Holly was doing her best to keep a straight face. It had been an incredibly long time since she had last gotten any friendly attention below the belt and she found Artemis’ inexperienced attempts were a lot better than nothing. She just needed to ignore that it was the result of someone compelling him from across the table. She could hold her anger back by tricking herself.

“Your alternate versions are going to get up to some trouble in two years,” Opal said. “I’ll be making my true political debut when I intervene in the Fowl Manor kidnapping incident. After I put down the B’wa Kell rebellion and take Cudgeon out, I’ll be next in line for a seat on the Council.”

“Just getting involved won’t put you on the Council,” Holly said. “Foaly and I have saved Haven plenty of times, and--”

Holly put a hand to her mouth to suppress a yelp. Artemis Fowl had just found her clit, and was starting to move from just lapping her pussy to some direct stimulation

Opal giggled, mimicking Holly’s sudden response.

“Oh, you crack me up,” she said. “I’m Opal Koboi, do you think I plan to spend _all_ of my time helping the LEP? No, I have other products in development that will make me legitimately loved by the People.”

Holly placed a hand below the table and into Artemis’ hair. He had zoned in on her clit now, flitting his tongue around it as it responded to his action. It was more intense than she would have expected out of him. Her breath caught in her lungs, and she could scarcely hear Opal through the blood rushing in her ears.

“You’ll benefit, too, Holly. With a Council member supporting you, I wouldn’t be surprised if you became a Commodore as early as your return from Hybras.”

Holly’s ear twitched. What she was hearing didn’t make sense immediately, and her thought process was interrupted when Artemis pressed his tongue firmly inside of her and pressed it upwards.

“Oh--”

Opal cocked her head. “Oh what?”

His lips closed over her mound and he sucked, his tongue bending to press in against her. Her hand pulled him deeper between her legs and her ankles crossed between his shoulder blades. She used her other hand to hide her face as Artemis’ efforts brought her closer to coming.

With one last lick, he brought her over the edge. She held onto her voice, instead letting the energy of her orgasm rush through her hips and legs, bucking twice against Artemis’ face as her muscles trembled and tightened. Above the table, she tensed her body to hide as much of the orgasm as possible from Opal’s perverse gaze. It was a pride thing.

Opal steepled her hands, looking across the table at her.

“Well, Captain Short, it looks like you’re satisfied. I’ll be sending Arty his meal soon. Isn’t it nice that we can be civil?”

“Sure. Civil is easy,” she said, too tired for more posturing.

Opal patted Holly’s hand. “Good. _Ciao_ for now. Mommy’s got places to be.”

As soon as the pixie was out, Holly got on shaky legs to take a look at Artemis. He was lying on his side, his eyes unfocused and his face slick with her juices.

“You okay?” she asked. She had been kind of forceful when she came.

“...Just a moment,” Artemis said after a long wait.

Holly inspected him closer. His prick was hard, and he was trying to hide the fact by curling up.

“Do you need some help with that?” Holly asked, pointing to the tent in his slacks. She tried to take a neutral tone, not too eager.

His hazel eye looked sideways at her with a silent plea, even before he swallowed and girded his loins to speak.

“Would you?” he asked, the doubt barely restrained in his voice.

Holly nodded, and he unzipped his pants, letting his painfully hard dick out from constriction. She joined him in the shadows under the table, letting herself rub across his back as she scooted herself to a position where she could reach his length with one hand while whispering to him from behind his shoulder.

“You did pretty well with your tongue down there,” she said, feeling him from his base to his tip. “Where’d you learn your technique?”

“I’m an avid reader,” Artemis said, holding his breath as Holly’s hand touched him for the first time, feeling himself almost deathly sensitive at the tip.

“I guess even a criminal mastermind finds time to slip some raunchy material into his rotation,” Holly whispered, still not gripping Artemis by the shaft, letting her fingers trail across the sensitive underside of his dick.

“I had been led to believe my efforts would take more time than that.”

“You got lucky. I’ve had a bit of a dry spell lately,” Holly said. “Not to mention that I’m more sensitive than the average fairy. It’s my Cupid genes.”

She increased the pressure just a bit, reminding herself that she was here to provide a bit of relief to a friend, not to be his guide to fairy sex culture. Her fingers gripped his dick now, but she made sure to keep it light, at least to begin.

“More sensitive than the average fairy? How so?”

Holly knew if she answered him normally, it would lead to more questions, and they didn’t have time to chat at the moment.

“They say elves are built for sex, Arty,” she said, stroking him faster but still letting her hand graze his tip to pick up more pre-come and keep his skin slick. “We absolutely love a good fuck, more than gnomes love gold or pixies love themselves.”

He gasped at that, but still had a retort prepared.

“More than a dwarf loves dirt?” he managed to joke, even as Holly’s fingers pumped him with an enthusiastic fervor.

“No, silly Mud Boy,” Holly whispered, speeding up even more and tightening her fist each time it bottomed out against his body. “But I love it enough to be jerking you off under the dinner table.”

He felt something building at his root and his breath quickened. It was incredibly arousing to hear such things from Holly’s mouth, and her breasts rubbed into his back as her arm moved. He felt surrounded by things that reminded him of her-- covered in her scent as her fingers jerked his dick, bringing sensations he had never felt alone.

“Ah _feck,_ ” Artemis cursed, feeling his orgasm slip out of his control. “Holly, I--”

Holly wasted no time, climbing over him to position his dick up between her breasts and stretching her tongue to touch his dripping tip. Artemis groaned as he came. His hand moved to Holly’s head, brushing her ear as he stroked her hair in ecstasy. She hummed in pleasure as his cock jumped once, twice, three times, shooting cum into her mouth, across her face, and all over her breasts. She applied a little more pressure, drawing the remnants out onto her body. Artemis panted with relief, the afterglow spreading across him like healing magic.

Holly swallowed what she had got in her mouth (she was not one to mind the taste at all) and kissed Artemis on the forehead.

“A lot better when we aren’t forced, isn’t it?”

Artemis just nodded. Holly’s performance had electrocuted his brain. It was as if his body steamed as he watched her exit from out under the table and finish off the last slices from her meal.

She winked at him. “I get first call on the shower.”

The robots had long since finished filling out the bathroom. Holly ran a quick inventory of what was packed inside. There was a sink (no mirror), a toilet, and a standing shower behind a sliding door. All-in-one body cleanser was deposited from a tiny nozzle in the shower, and it looked like hand-soap and toothpaste had their own taps by the sink. Holly figured that Opal had finally relented to the needs of hygiene, even if she still kept them in borderline nudity.

It wasn’t until the water began to rinse off the dirt of days that she could finally reflect on all that happened. She looked down at her chest as the water washed away rivulets of human cum down the drain.

_What have I done?_

Artemis recovered in time for his meal to be delivered by drone. It was a vegetable medley seasoned with some kind of blue-tinted salt and a combination of herbs. He devoured it quickly, not even caring to identify all of the ingredients. He could see the lotus root and pearl onions, but there were plenty of greens and pieces of herb that he lacked the information to classify. It wasn’t until his paper box was empty that he realized he had eaten it all with bare hands. Along with the sex act he had just participated in, his unscrupulous behavior had begun to worry him. Had imprisonment changed him?

A floating robot with dangling metal arms cleared up the remains of the meals and disappeared through a small window in the mirror-wall. Artemis noted it as another hidden entrance but thought no further on the subject. He was still trying to understand what had just happened with Holly. He had been forced to perform oral sex on her, but Holly had... enjoyed it? And immediately afterward, she had masturbated him to completion?

It was all overwhelming. He relied on Holly and looked up to her as a role model and trusted friend, but just minutes ago, they had cursed and groped at each other with bated breath while Opal Koboi leered on from above.

_I know I should have organized romantic dates for myself at an earlier stage in my life_ , Artemis thought. _Now I suffer from a complete lack of personal knowledge on any kind of sexual intimacy. Literature has almost absolutely failed me. I doubt that_ Portnoy’s Complaint _counts as relevant literature in this situation and recalling_ Venus in Furs _at this moment would be tantamount to willing my own destruction. None of the guides I read offered much guidance, and now it is too late to start from the fundamentals._

Holly stepped out of the bathroom, skin still wet from her shower. She stood unashamedly naked, drying her ears with the sleeve of the wrinkled dress shirt.

She explained herself. “Ears are the only part of me I can’t let air dry. They get flaky.”

“Interesting,” he said, stepping into the bathroom himself and fighting the impulse to cover his chest as she passed him. Holly had no compunction about showing skin, and he would follow her lead. Now that Opal had set up feeding, cleaning, and bathing in the prison, it was becoming obvious that they would not be leaving for some time. He needed to keep their bond strong—they could not avoid each other forever.

He left the bathroom refreshed but with some very large questions. Holly was relaxing at her seat in the table, the high back hiding everything but her hair from his view.

“Let’s have a strategy session,” she said. “No escape talk. We’ll talk about what we think is going on outside and what we can do here on the inside.”

“Agreed,” Artemis said, taking his seat gingerly, pulling on his underwear to at least give a small amount of cover. Once he was ready, Holly started with her take on the situation.

“So far, it seems Opal became unpredictable in a new way. If we take her words today at face value, she’s planning to position herself as the savior of the Lower Elements. Her true goal seems to be securing the loyalty of Haven and establishing control over the Council.”

“And judging by her comments about making you a Commodore, she intends to manipulate the parallel versions of ourselves into becoming tools for her ambition.” Artemis had been listening back under the tables, even if his body was controlled.

“Would that work? What about the Butterfly Effect?” Holly asked. “Wouldn’t our memories become inaccurate as she continues to use them?”

Artemis himself had to think about Holly’s question but he could make an inference based on a few observations.

“We are very early in the history of this new reality,” he began. “Until I receive more empirical information regarding the effects of our journey, I can neither confirm nor deny the effects of an interrupted time loop.”

“It’ll take time to pick up info from Opal,” Holly said. “Chances are she’s listening to us right now, so the more we talk about it, the better she’ll be able to counter us.”

“An astute observation. Let’s change subjects, then. What should we occupy our time with?”

Holly smiled wryly, gesturing with her head to the space underneath the table. Artemis blushed in response.

“But if I’m serious, we don’t have much to do than continue your exercises. The style I use was made for the People to learn over decades, so you’ll have plenty of material to work with. And with all the other exercises, you might tone up nicely.”

Artemis sighed. “If I must. Our jailor may supply more items over time, but artificial scarcity has been part of her plan. Over time, we may come to welcome her presence as a relief from the monotony.”

“That would take more than a few years of this,” Holly said. “It takes all of my self-control not to attack her each time I see her.”

Artemis was guilty that he held no such violent impulse, as much as he recognized Opal as an enemy.

“I hesitate to think of this, but she could keep us imprisoned for the remainder of my natural lifespan,” he said. “Even if we found ourselves released, where would we go? We’d be time-traveling renegades and our very existence could cause disasters if we intersected with our parallel selves.”

Holly shook her head. “At least we would be free of _this_. Would that be so bad?”

“In all likelihood, I will be dead within a century of this moment.”

Artemis spoke with brutal honesty.

“You would be stranded alone, the only remnant of a dead reality. The LEP would recognize you instantly in Haven, and humans would ostracize you. I’ve seen the criminals, vagabonds, and maladapted fairies who make their homes on the surface. It does not seem to be a happy life.”

Holly shrugged. “I can handle myself. What’s most important is getting you free. I’m not going to let you die down here.”

Artemis frowned, his older face managing to look threatening when he would normally be annoyed.

“I deserve this, Holly. It was my sin that started it and it is only right that I receive punishment.”

Holly lifted her hands up in the air in frustration.

“Opal is our only enemy here,” she said. “We’re just caught up in this. It’s not your fault. Now come on, if we have time to complain about the situation, we have time to try some push-ups.”

Artemis groaned but took his position next to her. This, at least, seemed productive.


	10. Chapter 10

**Eight years in their Future**

“We haven’t gotten anywhere!” N⁰1 groaned. “This is the last time I trust computers.”

Foaly swatted the back of N⁰1’s robe with his tail.

“In my office, that statement counts as sacrilege.”

N⁰1 tried to strike back but missed. “Your searches are all coming back negative. Whatever happened to hands-on policework?”

Foaly squinted at N⁰1. “According to you, hands-on policework got sent eight years in the past. Old-fashioned masterminding is also stuck there, so by your own testimony, we two nerds are the only people available to chase them.”

“Nerd?” N⁰1 asked in disbelief. “Just because I have a sliver of competence in my field--”

His rebuttal was interrupted by Foaly’s computer beeping.

“Opal Alert System activating,” the computer said. “That trixie pixie is doing something fishy.”

N⁰1 slammed his hand into his forehead. The Foaly of this reality had responded to Opal beating him in the technology race by obsessing over the eccentricities of his tech.

“Computer, put it on screen,” N⁰1 said. Nothing happened.

“Computer, slap that big-headed pixie on the good monitor,” Foaly said, and they immediately saw a camera feed from the shuttle bay of the Koboi Industries building. Opal was talking to a tall gnome.

“Please, Miss Koboi, if not for yourself, for the child. Piloting a shuttle is very strenuous work--”

Opal put a finger to her lips, and Sool shut up.

“I’m not going to raise my voice, gnome,” Opal said. “I care about my child very much, but I need to do this alone for my own reasons. I can promise you, I have more flying experience than most people inside the LEP. An easy flight like I’m taking is nothing at all.”

“Please, Miss Koboi,” Shamagh Sool said, pleading. “Is the father on the surface? Is he an exile? Oh, no, is he a Mud--”

Opal snapped, and a magical shockwave knocked the FoalyTech surveillance bug off of its ledge. Its skilled operator managed to keep it hovering, but it was a close call.

“Did she just kill that gnome?” Foaly asked N⁰1. “We need to get LEPtactical in there. Call the breach warlocks, she’s doing black magic!”

N⁰1 denied him flatly. “He’s not dead. That was a stun hex. Oh, and now she’s drawing memories from his head.”

Opal looked down at the unconscious employee.

“Sorry, Shamagh, but a pixie like me as all sorts of secrets,” she said.

“She’s doing a femme fatale bit,” Foaly said. “I’ll get my tracker bug onto that shuttle while she’s occupied.”

The floating bug attached to the wing. Foaly watched the shuttle completely disappear as the pad doors opened and air rushed off. Shamagh looked around, confused.

“Not again,” he said, kicking his foot at the floor.

Back in his office, Foaly was gloating to N⁰1 about the supremacy of computers, but the demon was too concerned about what he had heard.

“Could the father of that child really be a Mud Man?” N⁰1 asked. “I thought that kind of thing was propaganda. Humans lost the talent for magic, and thus lost their ability to reproduce with magic beings.”

“That might only be true on the surface level,” Foaly said. “I’m not the biggest biotech guy but I was doing a bit of light reading on fertility a while ago. Most hybridization between fairy families has unstable results. Just imagine what happens on the genetic level when a water-sprite and a gnome have a kid—complete chaos. It’s humans who have the best potential for stable hybridization.

N⁰1 looked quizzically at Foaly. “That sounds like a fringe theory.”

“Oh yeah, definitely. The elf who published it was fired and the ‘kill all Mud Men’ crowd continues to call them ‘a filthy mud-humping pervert’. It really sucks because the science checks out.”

N⁰1 realized that he had accidentally stumbled onto one of the pockets of deep knowledge Foaly loved to accumulate. He could add a few things from the Warlock side of the equation.

“It’s interesting that you mention that,” N⁰1 said. “According to Qwan’s own memories before the war, Humans actually had some of the highest potential for magic use before the fighting started. They were once part of the People, even if they lived half as long as the rest of us.”

“Half as long?”

“Half a life is long enough to produce some amazing human warlocks. In fact, the war against the Mud Men was lost because human warlocks sided with their ungifted species against the People. Qwan tells me demons, elves, and humans used to duel for days, shooting rudely-shaped spells at each other from the peaks of mountains.”

“Enough about the phallic fireballs,” Foaly said. “You brought that anecdote up for a reason.”

“Yeah, yeah, don’t rush me,” N⁰1 said. “In re-education class, Section 8 told all of us demons that we had been lied to and Mud hybrids were impossible because their sex cells do not interface with the 20-year time-lock that each fairy has.”

“Sex cells? Interface? Those don’t sound like words I would use to talk to demons fresh off the rock.”

N⁰1 shook his head. “They actually did a very good job of using language from _Lady Heatherington Smythe’s Hedgerow_ , but that’s beside the point.”

He pointed to a freeze-frame of Opal at the Council meeting.

“We know humans practically sterile thanks to some very adventurous elves with surface visas. Qwan works at Customs sometimes, scanning for magical contraband, and you’d be surprised at the number of the People who come back from vacation with bellies full of--”

Foaly whinnied and prepared his tail to strike, so N⁰1 skipped to the end.

“In conclusion, Opal’s baby can’t be a hybrid unless the father was already touched by magic in some way. And the only Mud Man I know of that’s connected to her and has used magic at least once is named...”

“Oh, gods,” Foaly whispered.

“No, his name is Artemis Fowl,” N⁰1 said. “Frond isn’t even a... Sweet Hybras, are those tombstones?”

Foaly’s bug showed that Opal’s shuttle journey had ended at a certain bend in the river in Ireland. It had been where Artemis had met Holly years ago. Never mind that said meeting involved a tranquilizer rifle and a kidnapping. It was important, nonetheless.

The site was even marked, although not by any normal monument. Two tombstones stood there, almost picturesque. One was slightly higher than the other. Opal approached the stones and whispered something inaudible, her lips barely even moving. Foaly had to move his bug to get it in range, moving low and slow instead of flying. Opal’s voice sounded bitter as the bug entered recording range.

“I loved you so much, Arty, I really did. And Holly, too.”

Foaly and N⁰1’s mouths dropped. N⁰1’s chair was tilted backwards, and he couldn’t stop himself from falling over in time.

“It’s your baby, Arty. She’ll be a girl. I think I’m going to call her Poppy. Holly told me that’s what she was called as a child.”

It was chaos within the office as the words came in. Foaly reared up involuntarily, knocking his keyboard aside.

“What the hell am I hearing?” he said. “What is going on? How does she know that thing about ‘Poppy’?”

They were brought back into reality when the shuttle took off, leaving the bug behind. Foaly’s keyboard had fallen and he couldn’t try anything until N⁰1 fished it from under the desk.

Foaly took deep cleansing breaths as he got back in control of his bug. He let a little bit of his paranoid thinking re-enter this mind. He needed a mental edge against whatever he had just witnessed.

“There’s absolutely no reason to trust the words of Opal,” Foaly said. “We have to test this all the way, starting with the grave.”

Ground-penetrating scans revealed two bodies, one in each grave. The bone structures returned as human male and elf female. The gravestones they lay under were otherwise unmarked.

“That doesn’t prove anything,” Foaly said. “Those could be fabricated.”

N⁰1 interrupted. “Why not just do some of your technology stuff and test their DNA?”

“Test their DNA? Tell me how I’m supposed to dig down that deep without official clearance.”

N⁰1 had no advice. Foaly continued his rant.

“Not to mention that a DNA test wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between them and clones.” Foaly said incredulously. “Disturbing a grave is a serious crime against the Book.”

“Book? What book?” N⁰1 let a tiny flash of lightning pass between his fingers. “There’s only one book demons are interested in, and it isn’t written in Gnommish. Get me up there and I’ll get a spell going to get to the bottom of this.”

Foaly shook his head.

“That’s not going to work. Demons are well covered under the enchantments of the Book now, whether or not they’ve read it.”

N⁰1 zapped the wastebasket in frustration, which let out a little cough of smoke.

“Don’t take it out on the appliances, imp,” Foaly said. “I’ve got a backup plan.”

His bug had left a little gob of nanite-filled resin on the wing of Opal’s shuttle. It would disintegrate over time to create a floating trail of tiny automata that could be tracked on sensors. He pulled up a display of the track superimposed over the globe.

“Wherever she’s going, it’s not straight back to Haven,” Foaly said. “She’s headed West across the Atlantic, maybe to Canada.”

“The Americas?” N⁰1 said. “Is there even anyone we know that far out?”

Foaly grinned. Opal had slipped up and given them his lucky break.

“I know at least one dwarf. He doesn’t come cheap, but when his friends are on the line, his rates get very, very affordable.”

N⁰1 realized that Foaly was talking about Mulch Diggums.

“Okay, you get in contact with him, then.” He stood up. “I’ve got to find somewhere that sells vole curry by the gallon.”

_What’s in Canada?_ Foaly wondered. _Is it really possible to keep two people of that caliber locked up for that many years? What has she done to Holly? How can Artemis not already have staged a prison break?_

Foaly knew his questions would only be answered when Mulch arrived on the scene.

Holly woke up halfway through her nap but couldn’t immediately place the disturbance. She lifted her elbow up from over her eyes and saw blue sparks shooting into the dimly lit cell.

_Strange,_ she thought. The source of the sparks was Artemis, who had supposedly used the last of his magic up at the start of this whole time-travel debacle. He had nowhere to draw energy from either, so it doubly confused her.

“Arty,” she called out to him, but received no response. “Artemis!”

He wasn’t sleeping-- he was unconscious, moaning as if he was in pain. Holly shifted herself out from her sleeping corner, tying her clothes as she stepped over to where Artemis lay. She wasn’t a magic expert but had enough training to diagnose what was going on. Usually, kids learned to hold on to their magic before they learned how to walk, but Artemis was an adult with magic shooting out of his fingers, not just bubbling up like young magic would.

She lifted an eyelid to check his pupil underneath. No abnormal dilation, so he wasn’t in some state of shock.

“Gods, what is the matter with you?” Holly whispered.

The lights in the cell suddenly increased to full brightness and Holly had to cover her face as the new arrival entered.

“Mommy heard Arty was having a little trouble,” Opal said. She was wearing the simple robe she preferred in the dungeon, so Holly guessed she had been waiting in a nearby surveillance room.

“You had something to do with this,” Holly said.

“Something to do with this? Poppy, I had _everything_ to do with this.”

Opal followed it up by holding a hand outwards. The blue sparks gathered into a single arc of blue electricity that connected her to the sleeping Artemis.

She _is using Artemis to generate magic,_ Holly realized. _That’s why she got rid of all her animals. She had her very own Mud Man to experiment on and harvest from._

Opal giggled as her absorption came to an end.

“I took care of Arty’s little ‘nocturnal emission’ problem, and even made it out with a smidgen of magic. Where’s my ‘thanks’?”

If Artemis had magic, she needed to come up with a new plan.

“How...”

“His magic comes from a variety of plants,” Opal said. “And plenty of magesalt.”

“Magesalt is toxic even in the smallest dosages,” Holly said. It was an illegal substance. “You’ll lose him if you keep feeding him that.”

Opal shook her head. “Magesalt is only toxic to born fairies. Mud People can munch away at it with few effects other than a slight increase in blood pressure. And immense amounts of magic coursing through their bodies, of course.”

Magesalt was a development from the time of the last war, when fairy traitors and human mages were attempting to increase their advantage over the People. The most powerful warlocks had used the wave energy in ocean water to generate salt infused with magic energy. Their blue crystals could resupply inexperienced mages with energy during duels against fairies.

Even an inexperienced human would be capable of outlasting and overwhelming a Demon warlock if supplied with enough magesalt. After the war, large formations of the magic crystals continued to form in deep-sea vents, creating a black market for fairies where those ungifted by magic would eat poisonous salt just to feel the power.

“You must have paid a lot of money to get all that magesalt,” Holly said. “Last time I checked, it had a street value of one ingot per gram.”

Opal scoffed. “Pay? For magesalt?”

Her face seemed just a little too excited. She wasn’t looking at her with the usual superior smirk; a wide grin was plastered across her face.

“I grow it right in my lab, Poppy. I control prices across the whole of the Lower Elements. It’s me, do you understand? _I_ call the shots.”

Opal began vibrating with energy. Holly backed away slowly, reaching for a Neutrino that wasn’t there. Opal looked at her hand confusedly, but the effect went away after a few moments and her air of calm returned.

“I hate to say it, but that boy is packing some stellar magic on him. Maybe I could make him my pet Mud Mage, what do you think?”

“Sounds dangerous,” Holly said.

“Dangerous? Yes, but not for me,” Opal said. “It will be dangerous for my competitors. I have many of them left untouched on the surface. There’s a whole market for me to dominate.”

It did not seem very reasonable to ‘create’ a mage. Warlocks were almost all born with their talents, and it took a lifetime of learning to simply control their power. Holly crossed her arms.

_“_ It won’t happen any time soon,” Opal said. “Arty still needs to learn all the magic I can teach him.”

Opal was looking down at the sleeping Mud Man, but her gaze flashed to Holly as if she could read her mind.

“I’m sorry to say this, but I don’t trust either of you enough to let up on the pressure.”

“Come on, Opal, aren’t we friends?” Holly said. “I haven’t lifted a finger against you in days.”

“Oh, you’ve certainly been helpful, Poppy.” Opal adopted a patronizing tone. “I’m glad to see you getting so... close with the Mud Boy. I’ll admit it: All of that training you’ve done with him has made me jealous.”

Opal crossed her arms and hugged them close to her body, pressing her robe into her body. Holly got a pretty clear image of what Opal hinting and a beat of sweat formed on her forehead.

“I’m sure there’s plenty of good pixies out there for you,” Holly said. “Why go after a Mud Man?”

“I might ask you a similar question,” Opal said. “I still don’t understand why you went right for his penis the instant I left the room yesterday. Is that level of shamelessness an elf thing?”

Holly let a fist ball up but didn’t dare attempt to sock Opal right in her big face. Lashing out now would remove all of the power she had gained by accepting Artemis.

“He deserved a little something after everything you made him go through,” she replied.

“Hmm,” Opal said, smirking as she considered Holly’s explanation. “The only reason I give him any attention is because it’s _so_ exhausting to go shopping for my own toys. Surely you don’t mind if I borrow yours?”

“He’s not my toy,” Holly said, gritting her teeth.

“You only say that because you haven’t played with him the right way. Maybe I’ll show you one of these days.”

Opal drew the last strand of magic from Artemis’s body and then left the room, her threat hanging in the air. Holly checked Artemis’s vitals again and found his heart rate and breathing had returned to normal. It might seem that Opal was doing him a favor by dragging out all his magic, but she was the one who had induced it within him in the first place.

Artemis’ chest rose and fell. He was early in his training yet, but Holly could visualize the places on his body where the muscle would grow and become toned - she could see a sense of composure developing in his movements even when he lay panting after exercise.

Their physical ability to escape was increasing. If Opal really did train Artemis in magic, she might end up giving him the tools to resist his own hex and potentially counter it someday. In the meantime, Holly would have to do all the planning and preparation by herself.

Her first thought was the shower in the bathroom. That water could be her weapon against the systems keeping them inside. She began her planning phase just like Julius had taught her to: thinking about everything that could go wrong.


	11. Chapter 11

Artemis managed 10 kicks without losing his balance, and Holly rewarded him with a pat on the thigh.

“Alright, alright, you’re actually getting the hang of that. Let’s see them from your other leg.”

He flipped his stance accordingly and sent out the same exact number of kicks, unerringly precise. He was ambidextrous, after all, and had never preferred one side of his body over the other.

“That’ll do for now,” Holly said. “Let’s try jabs.”

Jabs had only started last week, after Holly decided that Artemis could add something to his kicking. She raised her hands above her head as targets for him.

“Jab, jab... dodge!” She let him tag her hands a few times before sending a fist of her own for him to dodge. It was a work in progress, and he often found himself being distracted as they moved side-to-side. Even taking it slow, he found himself caught by her taps.

One time, he was so distracted that he didn’t dodge at all. Holly’s open palm made solid contact with his face, the slap resounding in the room.

“Oh gods,” she said. “Are you good?”

Artemis felt his face. “I should be fine.”

His eyes were still directed at Holly, but he found it hard to meet her eyes. It would seem he had developed a fascination with her body lately, and his willpower was becoming unable to deal with the gravity of his own flesh. At the moment, he was fixated on her exposed breasts. He had felt them only briefly when they had been under the table, but the memory still made his back tingle.

“Where are you looking? ... Oh.” Holly’s concern evaporated, and she crossed her arms over her chest.

“We’re in the middle of training, Arty. Not quite the time for that.”

Artemis grinned but Holly caught his look.

“You’re not getting a single peek until you can get through a set without getting clipped,” she said.

They went through the drill again. This time, Artemis stepped a little faster and he kept his eyes up, ready for Holly’s attacks. He weaved out of the way of the first two attempts. Then she sent an entirely new swipe at him, an uppercut. Artemis stepped back on reflex to dodge. It was the first time he had improvised.

“I guess it was just a motivation issue,” Holly said teasingly, then dropped her arms to let him see.

Artemis found his eyes drawn first to her face. She looked at him with confidence, allowing herself a smile. He let his gaze drop to her chest, admiring her clear brown skin. There was about a hand’s width of space on her chest between her breasts.

The general form was pointed, each breast sloping gently to the nipples while their fundament held firm. He wanted to place his hands on them, to feel their give between his fingers. He wondered he would perceive the puffy circles of her areolas and the nipples that protruded from them.

“Like what you see?” Holly asked.

“Assuredly.” He continued staring.

“Well, we’ve still got crunches, pushups, and a cooldown left, so I’ll have to take my tits out of your sightline for now.”

“If you must,” Artemis said. “My thanks, Holly.”

“My pleasure,” she said, and took her position to the right of him again.

“If you can get one push-up over your previous record, I might let you touch them.”

Thus energized, he went through the rest of his routine with force, beating his previous record on push-ups by four. He grew hot from the effort and his loins tickled in anticipation as they stretched during their cooldown.

Although he and Holly had shared that heated moment under their dinner table, no further moments of physical intimacy had followed it in the days since. It was understandable if Holly was not in the mood, but Artemis was unclear what had compelled her to start with him in the first place.

Before he was done with limbering up, the comfortable silence between he and Holly was interrupted by the _whoosh_ of their door. All his dreams of mammary manipulation had to be instantly discarded.

“Mommy’s home,” Opal announced with glee.

It was exactly a week after the previous visit. Like before, she had brought food for herself and Holly while Artemis would be fed a rough meal of plain vegetables and herbs. It was what he was fed every day. Opal had even denied him utensils, so he was stuck picking at the food with his hands like some paleolithic scavenger.

Hunger compelled him to finish his food, but he found himself staring, sullen, at Opal’s plate. They were eating something fried and covered with a vibrantly red sauce. He found himself salivating like one of Pavlov’s hounds, imagining the intense flavor of her food.

After a lifetime of getting what he wanted, Opal had finally shown him that so much of his time and effort had been spent on frivolous fancies that lacked true desire. At the moment, he craved few things more than their food. He imagined it was starchy with tastes other than ‘bitter’ and ‘salty’. The need for variety possessed him.

Opal noticed him staring.

“Hmm, what is it, Mud Boy?” she asked. “Do you want something from my plate?”

Artemis nodded. If he spoke, he might stimulate Opal’s instincts.

“How impertinent. Well, come over there then. Beg me for it.”

Artemis glanced at Holly, but she refused to make eye contact. Begging for food would place him firmly under the heel of Opal during this visit, and that was a dangerous place for anyone to be, lest she decide to press down.

“Don’t be a tease, Arty. Beg for your food.”

The hex forced him into the trap he had set for himself and he crawled next to Opal’s chair to look up at her. He found no mercy in her eyes.

“Please,” he said.

Opal smirked. “Open your mouth.”

She lifted a cube of potato and dropped it into his mouth. He chewed, feeling the crispy surface split under his teeth. The taste was rich. He opened his mouth for seconds.

Opal dipped her pointer finger in the sauce and stuck it into Artemis’ mouth, rubbing it all along his tongue. It was spicy and sweet and coated his tongue, but Opal kept her finger pressed down, pinning it in place. She extended her middle finger in as well, relishing the control she had. Then he felt every finger in his mouth except for her thumb.

Artemis made a sound of surprise as his mouth was forced wider by the new fingers and she rubbed them along his tongue and teeth, stimulating sensitive nerves that made him shiver involuntarily. If she went any deeper, he would have gagged. It was a violation of his body. She hooked her fingers under his top row of teeth and brought him to his feet by pulling.

Opal loosened the sash of her robe and took Artemis’ hand, guiding it to the gap she had opened up.

“Touch me,” she said.

  
Artemis felt his hand sliding between folds of silk to the soft cushion of Opal’s abdomen, before Opal directed his hand higher to her breasts. Her smaller hands closed in on his own and made him squeeze. Her flesh felt pulpy as his fingers sank in. Opal hissed at the feeling, but kept her fingers tightening around his hand until Artemis was almost certain that he was hurting her. Holly was looking out of the corner of her eye, her arms crossed.

“Pull.” Opal commanded him. “Twist.”

Artemis’s clenched fingers pulled downwards, feeling Opal’s flesh shift to accommodate. Her nipple was hard against his palm now, barely large enough for him to feel.

“Twist,” Opal said again. Her voice was breathy, but she still retained the controlled tones she had no doubt practiced for years to obtain.

Artemis started rotating his hand at the wrist. At first, there was no effect but with every fractional turn, he swore he could feel Opal’s heartbeat quicken. Even though this undoubtedly was causing pain, Opal was able to direct her imperious glare from Artemis to Holly, daring them to react to her pain. Once she went numb, she let Artemis disengage.

“Good,” she said, returning to an equilibrium moments after Artemis had let go.

“Now let’s kiss.” She seized Artemis by his long hair and forced him to bend even further. “Keep your mouth open for me.”

Artemis’ mouth would not close, despite his intentions, remaining at least a quarter open as Opal forced her lips against his. She slid her tongue inside, touching his and playing with it, snakelike. Then she pushed deeper into his mouth. His mind became clouded, filled with a sensation he had never felt before, overstimulated. He felt shame in the back of his mind, but the rest was dominated by the physical sensation.

Opal broke his trance when she used a foot to push him away from her. He was left unbalanced and had no choice but to fall over on his rear. Opal slid from her chair to follow him.

“Okay, Mud Boy, enough of all this fun. It’s time for you to learn some magic.”

Once he realized Opal meant an actual lesson, Artemis’ mood instantly improved. He had been preparing for it ever since Holly had told him about the magic-inducing ingredients in his daily meals. Secretly, he looked forward to learning how a skilled magician might use their power. He had intuited certain techniques during his time with stolen magic, but he had been too cautious to delve into actual transformative forms.

“First, I’ll test you on healing, the simplest magic.” Opal jabbed her pointed nails into his shoulder and scraped, causing deep scratches down his arm.

“Heal,” Artemis said, on reflex, letting the magic jump up from his body and scab over the wound. Opal examined the new skin and shrugged.

“You may heal yourself, but what about another target?” Opal said. Artemis feared that she was about to attack Holly, but curiously, Opal caused a tiny wound on herself, using her little finger to scratch the back of her own hand.

It was not something he would have expected from her. It would have been a good excuse for Opal to harm Holly. Artemis healed the scratch, more out of surprise than any friendliness towards his captor.

“Next, you will attempt the _mesmer_.” Opal sat across from him, cross-legged. Her dark brown eyes were like those of a cobra, daring him to move.

“I believe that violates the term of our agreement,” Artemis said.

“Only if you succeed. Do you really think you can mesmer me? I think not, Mud Boy.”

“ _Call me by my name.”_ Artemis had drawn the magic into his eyes and spoke with the resonant tone that instinct had taught him.

“No, Mud Boy.”

“ _You will call me by my name,_ ” Artemis said again. He placed even more magical force behind it, feeling the sparks advancing up his spine and flowing into his eyes and throat.

Opal made a sound briefly but was quiet. Her right eyebrow twitched with effort, but she was resisting the mesmer without breaking eye contact.

“ _Obey me_ ,” he said. “ _My name is Artemis Fowl the Second, and you will refer to me by nothing else.”_

He felt his voice booming in his throat as the trickle of energy in his body became a cascade. The edges of his vision were ringed with a blue swirl of energy, but he kept focused on Opal. Her brows became deeply furrowed and she gritted her teeth. Artemis felt her resistance pushing against him on a plane of higher existence. Her mental-defensive wall was small but so dense that it could passively resist all of his force.

His _mesmer_ was comparatively loose, exhausting itself in endless waves against the barrier, even as he felt her mount a counterattack. Narrow strands of energy were being sent from her walls, surrounding the entire thrust of his spell.

Her defenses coiled around him in multiple overlapping helices until all of the energy he had sent into the spell was trapped in coils of spellcraft. The whole structure then collapsed on him, crushing him in one instant, each strand becoming needlelike as it entered him. He felt the _mesmer_ vaporize from his mind and Opal absorbed the remnants of its energy with glee.

“Well, Arty, let no one say you didn’t try,” she said. “Maybe you just need the right target.”

Opal waved to Holly. “Would you mind coming here, elf? The Mud Boy has something he would like to say to you.” 

Holly approached with caution. Artemis could see her walking on the rounds of her feet as her ears twitched. She must have seen all that had happened here and knew what she was walking into. The alternative would be being forced into it.

She put on a smile as she joined them.

“ _Mesmer_ her,” Opal said. “Compel her to do something.”

Artemis did not want to degrade Holly, but also knew of Opal’s desire to see her captives act on each other. If he chose an arbitrary and inconsequential _mesmer,_ he knew he would be forced into casting something worse.

“ _Rub your tummy and pat your head,_ ” Artemis said to Holly, letting just a fraction of his magic free.

“Sure thing,” she said, rubbing her stomach over the tied-on shirt and patting her head with the lightest touch of her hands.

Opal feigned a yawn. “Show me some real sparks, or I’ll teach you just how far the mesmer can go.”

Artemis swallowed in nervousness. He had to think of something Opal might like more. It was hard to focus because Holly was still executing his previous command, rubbing and patting with an air of whimsy. He could not bring himself to betray her in a way that would satisfy Opal.

“ _Open your mouth,_ ” he said.

“Aaah.” Holly opened wide, letting Artemis on the sight of her small white teeth.

He heard Opal’s approving laugh.

“ _Stick out your tongue._ ”

Holly let the red length of her tongue poke out of her mouth. Her eyes shone with trust for him. He lost his will to continue. He could not say the next command.

It took only a moment for Opal to realize what had happened, but she seemed to forgive Artemis’ half-finished procedure.

“You can perform a _mesmer_ ,” she said. “That puts you at the level of a ten-year old. But can you counter my own mesmer on another subject?”

Opal replaced his spell on Holly with one of her own, leaning over and whispering it into a pointed ear. Holly listened to her instructions, blinked once, and then nodded.

“Sorry. Opal said it has to be this way.” She shot forward, her arm extended to catch Artemis at his neck and force him down to the ground.

“What--” Artemis held Holly’s hand back as it attempted to cover his mouth. “What is this?”

Opal just laughed as Holly tried to cover Artemis’ face and mouth.

“Stop,” he said, his hands occupied in preventing himself from being smothered. Holly pinched him in retaliation and he nearly allowed his guard to drop, remembering just in time to keep his hands up, like she had taught him.

“ _Stop!”_ he shouted, feeling the magic surge to his command. Holly’s only reaction was to close her hands around his throat and begin squeezing. His breath was locked away.

He reached his perception out through his magic and realized that the mesmer would need to be defeated before he could stop Holly from throttling him. The magic barrier was far less contested within a third party’s mind, and he worked to decode the strange patterns appearing as he probed at the foreign spell. It was the key to freeing her, that much was obvious, but it was a puzzle with multiple steps.

Holly’s grip on his throat was light enough to let him speak, but it would still disable him if it continued. Artemis recalled Opal’s strategy against him and tried to replicate what he had seen. Simultaneous extensions of his own magic energy grew from his mind. He could control three strands at once, directing each one through a twisting labyrinth of Opal’s design.

The mental burden of three detailed spells nearly shattered his concentration. _Finally, a problem truly worth the mental effort_ If even one strand was dropped, the mesmer would hold and Opal would walk away a winner. His need to prove himself better than the maniacal pixie was what brought him through the challenge. In the same flash of thought, his three counter-spells intersected and shot through the _mesmer_ , sending fragments of the spell into the air as sparks.

Holly collapsed on his chest, freed, and he laid a protective arm across her to shield her from Opal’s eyes.

“Hmmph,” Opal said, looking just above Artemis. “You are lucky that I was not actively reinforcing that _._ But I do have a spell that you will never beat.”

She pointed at his hex. “You are mine to command, Mud Boy. Now and forever.”

He felt the rune become active as the embedded spell began to emit waves of pain into him. It was closed off from his magic and instead worked directly on his body and mind.

“Get your revenge on Captain Short, Mud Boy. Make her realize you are not a man to be trifled with.”

Artemis tried to fight the command as he flipped Holly onto her back. With one of the large hands he scarcely recognized as his own, he held Holly’s throat, feeling her pulse against his fingers. His other hand grabbed savagely at her chest, pressing a breast against her. He could not even control his eyes. He saw himself staring into Holly’s frightened face while a strange growl built in his throat.

“Arty... please.” Holly said, her voice on the edge of breaking. Her eyes were desperate. Artemis struggled within himself, pulling helplessly at the bars that trapped him in a distant corner of his mind. He needed to stop his motor functions before Opal used him to complete this act of violence.

Surveying the magic within himself, he found that he could not touch the spell that kept him under control. But he could target his own body. He prepared all of the magic he had left in him, winding it into a cone of compressed energy. It was his only possible recourse. He aimed the projectile at his spine. He could stop himself if enough force were applied.

Artemis let go of the energy and felt it hit his back like a hammer blow. His hands stopped their assault and he fell forward onto Holly, corpselike. He felt her crawl out from under him as his rune began burning in intense pain at his rebellion.

“Gods, no,” Holly said, checking his pulse. “A direct neural impact?.”

Artemis heard Opal stand up, wordless.

“Opal, you did this. He wasn’t ready and you taught him anyway. Fix him. Fix him now.”

“The boy is fine. Shut up.” Opal’s words were ice cold, delivered like the villain they all knew she was.

“I already have your memories. There is nothing else I need from you. You are disposable, and I will not hesitate to discard you the instant my orders are no longer followed.”

The door closed. Holly returned to Artemis and managed to roll him onto his back.

“Arty,” she said, the tears still not gone from her eyes. “I was trying to tell you it was all right. You can’t hate yourself for what she makes you do.”

To the relief of Artemis, sensation was returning to his body. The spell had only been a temporary lockdown on his nervous system, not a physical attack. He sat up, finally thankful for his newfound abdominal strength.

“Sorry,” he said weakly.

“I already told you-” Holly was interrupted.

“I meant to apologize about the mesmer. It was my active decision to say what I said.”

She placed a hand on the side of his head to hold him in place and looked at him eye-to-eye.

“What about my actions? I was choking you!”

“There is nothing you could do that would hurt me,” Artemis said. “That was what I was thinking the entire time you were under her mesmer.”

His voice shook, and Artemis noted that he was about to cry. Holly took his hand in hers and then he saw her face moving towards his, eyes closed. He offered his lips to hers, and they kissed.


	12. Chapter 12

This time that they kissed, it was no perfunctory occurrence, as it had been too many times before. Opal had left them with a desperation that sought comfort through the only friendly flesh it could find. Artemis felt Holly’s lips become still against his, unwilling to give up their contact.

As they went in for a second kiss, Artemis was engrossed. It completely subsumed his thoughts, and he lost his sense of self-awareness. Somehow, their tongues became involved and a shiver ran up his back as he felt someone else inside of his mouth. Unlike Opal’s attempts, Holly’s presence was welcome. He could not explain it, but there was an element of play that existed there. He wanted more.

He embraced her and pulled her against him, and she followed, balancing herself in his lap and throwing her hands over his shoulders. He gave in, laying down while Holly straddled him hip-to-hip. He moved his hands to her thighs, finding them pliable but with a second level of firmness beneath. As he passed over hips and to her torso, he amazed to find that the same pattern held over the rest of her body. It was not easy to forget that Holly was a trained fighter, but Artemis was still astonished by the interplay of soft and hard on her body.

She untied her clothing and cast it to the side, biting on her lip in anticipation, one hand on a breast and the other over her mons.

“You next,” she said, reaching below herself to help with his slacks. He could hardly kick them off fast enough, raising his hips so that his boxers could follow right after. As the flurry of action died down, he realized there were no more barriers between his body and Holly. She held his member in her hand and coaxed it with a practiced hand until it stood, before pressing it back down so that it lay flat along his abdomen.

She then lowered her body over it so that she could slide on it lengthwise, her slick weight moving across him. She exhaled with relief, her labia and her clit rocking into contact at one end, before she pulled back and dragged her slick surface along him again..

He began trembling and had to pull his attention away from his partner to bring an end to it. He was nourished, his body temperature was warm, and he couldn’t detect any signs of illness within him, but the shaking continued. The tremors were definitely noticeable outside of his body, because Holly stopped the delicious motion of her hips.

“Arty?” her face was full of concern.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” he said, trying to get the words out from a shaking jaw.

Holly dismounted him and laid to one side, rubbing his chest in soothing circles.

“It’s okay,” she said.

Artemis raised one hand and observed it shaking. _A completely involuntary response._

“Don’t worry,” Holly said. “We can take it slow.”

“That may be for the best.” Artemis took a shuddering breath.

“Hey, it’s normal,” Holly said, her hand patting his chest. “Even in situations that aren’t this messed up.”

They lay quietly for a while longer, held against each other. Artemis tried to ascertain the roots of his nervousness. Perhaps it had been too soon after the events with Opal, the fear still present in his mind. His trembling could have been the remnants of fear pushing through the emotional catharsis.

The simplest answer, however, had to do with what he would prefer to ignore about himself: a near-complete lack of sexual experience **.** His subconscious could not deceive itself, and no amount of his private research could provide for an experience that his body lacked. Especially when his partner was someone as important as Holly.

“An ingot for your thoughts,” she said.

She sat up against the wall and letting a hand rest by his head while he spoke.

“I believe I was simply nervous about making a mistake.”

“A mistake?”

“That would have been my first time, you see.”

“Your first time… having sex?” Holly was surprised.

“Yes. I thought my inexperience would be more obvious.” The subject made him uncharacteristically shy.

“You showed some talent back under the dinner table,” Holly said. “I’m sure you’ll be fine at the rest of it, whenever you feel like trying. And if it doesn’t go well again, we’ll get plenty of time for retries.”

“Oh, good,” Artemis said. “That was my chief concern in past considerations.”

“You’ve thought about _us_ before?” Holly asked. “How far back are you talking?”

Artemis opened his mouth to respond, but realized her question did not have a good answer.

“Did you start with that kiss back at the zoo?” she asked.

Artemis shook his head.

“Did this have anything to do with Hybras and all your hormones?”

He looked guilty.

“Earlier than that?”

Artemis nodded. “It started as a purely intellectual question, you understand.”

“Probably didn’t stay intellectual for long.” She joked to put off the awkwardness.

“Of course not,” Artemis said. “You are beautiful, and you saved my life more times than I care to count. It did not take long before I cleaved to you.”

“You never showed any signs of that,” Holly said.

“I was a boy, and you are a woman of strength and resolve. It’s natural that I would keep such thoughts repressed. It would cheapen our partnership.”

Holly shrugged. “I didn’t even catch a hint, really. Puppy love is easy to spot, you know. I remember you were fascinated with a certain girl back in France.”

“And I regret every moment of that misadventure.“ Artemis slung his arm over his eyes. “At times, it really is best for friends to stay friends.”

“Great,” Holly said, her hand touching his bare shoulder for just a second. “That’s a good takeaway. When it comes to sex, I don’t think anyone could ever be bad enough to ruin a friendship.”

Artemis patted her knee in return. “Thank you. Talking about this has been quite the relief.”

But silently, Artemis wondered what sort of friends could bare their bodies so eagerly and move with such passion for each other. Such a friendship was another thing that Artemis had never experienced before.

The two laid back and spent what felt like an afternoon dozing under the lights. A few hours later, a hover-drone dropped a heavy band of metal on the table. Opal’s voice emanated from the speakers embedded in the walls.

“While I am gone, Arty will practice his magic by enchanting that piece of jewelry for me. There will be a test when I return. Do not fail me.”

Artemis inspected the circle of braided gold from where it had landed on the table, wary about touching it. The general structure reminded him of a collar, but a delicate pattern of scales was embossed upon each link in the solid braid. The pattern resembled a dragon, or perhaps a snake. The artifact was familiar to him, but he had no name for it.

“Is that a torc?” Holly asked.

Artemis recognized her word through Gnommish. A torc was not a collar, even if it was meant to be worn around the neck. It was better described as a piece of jewelry that would be secured around the neck.

Holly was the first to pick it up. “These went out of style a few generations back,” she said, turning it in her hands before handing it to Artemis.

“Do you have any idea how one enchants objects?” he asked.

Holly shrugged. “I can’t really tell you. Most fairies can barely get to the _mesmer_ stage _._ I felt you and Opal fighting over the spell in my mind, and I can tell you’re already beyond my talent. That was some amazing work.”

The compliment gave him some pleasure.

“This places me in a strange position,” Artemis said. “How am I supposed to develop a skill without comparing my work to others?”

“That’s something you’ll have to discover for yourself.” Holly was speaking earnestly. “But you’re smart. I know you can do it.”

“I will try to live to your expectations,” Artemis joked.

He sat at the table and began to work. Holly sat across from him, seemingly content to be there while he tinkered in silence.

The torc appeared to be one braided band of gold, but a section of it was removable, held in place by spring-loaded pins. Artemis gave Holly both pieces. It was too small for his neck but could be slipped onto hers when the section was removed.

“Could you try putting that on for me? It has no perceptible magic.”

“Sure,” Holly said, slipping the torc around the back of her neck and loading the movable section back into place.

She laughed. “The mechanism feels like the safety toggle on the old Neutrino 1922. Very satisfying.”

She turned her body back in forth within the chair, giving him different views of the jewelry around her neck. It was not tightly bound to her body, instead using its textured surface to hold it in place as she moved around.

“You look beautiful,” Artemis said.

Holly smiled. “I know that’s not flattery, but I can hardly believe you said it twice in a day.” She undid the torc and slid it back across the glossed surface of the table.

“It appears to be real gold,” Artemis said. “I would assume 14 carats, at the least.”

“Gold holds magical charge like nothing else,” Holly said. “If she gave you iron, it would have been nearly impossible to enchant.”

Hearing that, he decided to send a tiny spark of magic into the torc, and saw it sink into its surface, absorbed in an eyeblink. He tried to follow it with another spark, but nothing came.

“Holly, how do you recommend I measure my remaining magic? I think I’m running dry.”

“You might have a few sparks left if you try hard enough, but that’s a dangerous way to check. The easiest way I was taught was to summon up your magic within you without sending it anywhere. You can judge how much you have left based on the speed of its movement.”

Her explanation came quick and naturally. She knew plenty about magic, even if she would not admit it.

Artemis closed his eyes and followed her instructions. _Nothing._ He shook his head.

“That means you’re empty.”

“Ah,” Artemis said.

“You might as well put the work aside, then. You won’t be generating more magic until your next meal.”

He put the torc down and leaned back against his chair, still thinking about everything that had been done that day.

“You underestimated your ability as an instructor,” Artemis told Holly. “There are many things not included in the Book, such as the fact that gold holds is important because of its potential for enchantment.”

“Oh yeah, gnome enchanters used to do some amazing things centuries ago. In fact, most fairy technology are just replacements for enchanted gold artifacts.”

“Fascinating,” Artemis said, resting his head on his palm.

“I’m not sure if fascinating is the word I would use, but feel free to ask any questions that come to mind. I’m not doing anything.”

Artemis smirked. Holly was stretching her shoulders in her chair, giving him a certain amount of inspiration for his question.

“A few days earlier, you told me that some say that ‘elves were built for sex’. Could you elaborate on that?”

Holly’s ear tips went red.

“That was mostly a heat-of-the-moment thing,” she said, rushing. “There’s a stereotype that elves are somehow more sexual than other families of fairy.”

Artemis was intrigued. “So there is no logical basis for it?”

Holly looked over her shoulder as if concerned that someone in the room might overhear her.

“The stereotype came from a number of things. Elvish culture really values emotion and teaches us not to suppress our feelings. In early adulthood, this means that we form quick partnerships with the people we find interesting but split up almost as easily.”

“Elves have a very active dating scene, then,” Artemis said.

“It’s something of a cultural expectation. By forming these brief attachments to others, elvish youth are supposed to recognize what true love is like when they actually find it. Before that, it’s just a bit of casual fun before people get serious. The dating extends for something like the first century of an elf’s life.”

“So you’re in your golden age,” Artemis said.

“I would have been, but staff shortages at the LEP mean that everyone’s working long shifts. Police elves end up scrounging people from around headquarters.”

“Good pickings?” Artemis asked

“Gods, no,” Holly answered. “The LEP are a self-selective group of fairies. We all signed on because the prospect of romantic freedom was less attractive than policing for centuries straight. Not to mention that my unconventional career has hurt my prospects. There are more... approachable female officers for the boys to chase around. It’s been spotty for years now.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Artemis fretted with his bangs, discomfited by the openness Holly had on the issue.

“Oh don’t worry, I’ve accepted it. My long-term plans are certainly on hold _now_ , at least.”

Artemis changed the subject. “What are the other reasons behind that stereotype? It can’t just be the subject of dating.”

“All the other things are just genetics,” Holly said dismissively. “But those vary so much from person to person that it’s silly to measure them up.”

“What sort of things are elves falsely said to have?”

“Well, our ears are longer and more sensitive than other fairies, but they aren’t inherently sexual organs. I use them to hear, for Frond’s sake!”

She was embarrassed and angry in equal parts.

“So some fairies fetishize elves,” Artemis said. He could see parallels in human culture.

“Most fairies fetishize elves,” Holly said. “Even elves themselves. I blame it all on Cupid. He was a best-selling author and wrote entire books on sex. He practically started the ‘elves are nymphos’ stereotype.”

Holly got more animated, letting the disdain slip into his voice.

“Basically, he collected a lot of data and made sweeping claims off of it. Elves have sensitive ears, stronger emotions, wider hips, longer penises, higher libidos, better fertility rates, et cetera, et cetera. Did you know I’m a descendant of that guy?”

“It hasn’t come up,” Artemis said. “But this seems like a subject you have strong feelings on.”

Holly nodded vehemently. “Trust me, if you were the only she-fairy in your department, you would get radicalized on this kind of thing just as quick.”

Artemis cleared his throat. “I didn’t know it was so important to you. I’m glad, then, that we can be intimate.”

Holly wagged a finger at him. “Hey, none of what I said earlier doesn’t mean that I can’t also do a little bit of elf-play myself. Choosing to act up to the stereotype is something of a turn-on for me, probably because of all the time I spent on duty while the other elves were knocking boots.”

Artemis intuited that she was not just talking about her time at the LEP. Her family life must also have been difficult to reconciliate with the happy-go-lucky stereotypes of elves. It was like role-play.

“What about the other species? Do they have any stereotypes in the bedroom?”

Holly cracked a smile. “Well, first off, dwarves don’t like to do it in a bedroom. It’s gotta be in one of their own tunnels.”

“How inconvenient.”

“Gnomes are real traditionalists. They need three kinds of marriage ceremony before they’ll even hold hands, each one involving a substantial dowry.”

“Their attachment to gold seems almost rational in that context.”

“Now, I don’t want to stereotype sprites, but they have a strong exhibitionist tradition thanks to their wings. When springtime comes, LEPtraffic spends half of its time hosing down public monuments and chasing couples off of skyscrapers.”

Artemis was astounded. “Sometimes I wonder what mischief would occur if humans had wings.”

“But if we’re being serious, pixies have it the worst.”

“How so?”

“The females are supposed to be legally enslaved to the males,” Holly said. “At least, as long as their contract holds out.”

“How could anyone agree to something like that?” Artemis asked. “How have the People not outlawed it?”

“There’s no easy answer.” Holly was growing uncomfortable at the subject. “The People are a confederation, meaning that The Book is the only binding element between the Families. As long as pixies refrain from breaking the law, enslavement is a matter for the civic courts.”

“And I presume the civic courts act in favor of established tradition.”

Holly nodded glumly. “The only progress on the issue has been the instant legal termination of any contract where a partner has reported physical violence.”

“Why would they use a contract? I presume the forms of union in other Families are less restrictive.”

“Pixies have the most trouble with fertility,” Holly said. “A contract attaches two pixies until they have children or one dies. Both of them have to pay a penalty when a contract is broken, so two pixies often stay together even when they don’t want to. Advocates for the practice have argued that it makes for stable families.”

“I could hardly agree with that,” Artemis said, offended at the weak logic. “The only family it makes stable is the clan-family. It allows dynasties to benefit from political marriages and forces poor clans to be tied to one another.”

“That sounds about right,” Holly said. “Pixie business clans go on for generations, but they usually spend too much time infighting to really dominate the market. Opal was an only child, and she didn’t have to compete against siblings in a race to steal from her parents.”

_It always comes down to Opal,_ Artemis thought. _She is as I was. The smartest being in her household, her country, maybe even her world. The only difference was that her parents were forced together by contract and had extended that very same threat to her future. How would that have felt? How would the world look to her?_

“Don’t sympathize too much with her.” Holly’s warning cut through Artemis’ thoughts. “Her own freedom came by harming a lot of innocent people. Now that she’s the boss, we are first-hand witnesses that she continually chooses the bad option.”

“Yes.” Artemis agreed, but the information was creating new understandings within his head. As he followed his thoughts to their logical conclusion, his shivering and shaking returned.

“This is her doll house,” he said. “She uses us to act out her whims, whims shaped directly by her own background. That’s where her focus on control comes from.”

Holly cocked her head as she heard the theory. “That doesn’t explain why she chose us.”

Artemis leaned forward to explain it to Holly, feeling his nervous tremor return in his throat.

“We catalyzed a deep change in her being. She retaliated by enacting her project in our lives.”

“What project?” Holly asked. “I mean, other than the obvious one where we’re locked in here.”

Artemis lowered his voice even more.

“Think. Has anything happened during in this imprisonment that would not have happened otherwise?”

Artemis looked down at the table meaningfully. “If all she knew of love was contracts and coercion...”

“Oh, gods,” Holly said. Artemis saw the realization build through her. Questioning, then disgust. Before he could see where her expression ended up, the lights of their cell snapped off.

“It’s nighttime,” Opal’s voice said coldly. “All the good boys and girls should be asleep.”


	13. Chapter 13

The well-secured Koboi Industries compound was awash in gossip. Instead of managing the company from her usual imperious distance, the CEO had spent at least a month in physical residence, checking in personally at the various departments she had concentrated under one reinforced cavern roof.

“She’s like a shark, circling,” one manager said upon seeing Opal stalk his hallway. “I hear Miss Koboi has been asking all of her vice-presidents to identify their vacancies. Maybe she’s planning on cutting down on staff before next quarter.”

One of his workers had less imagination on the issue. “I was here when she took over the company. Hundreds of fairies were sacked with none of these in-person visits.”

Opal was managing a whole crowd of people as she speed-walked through tiled corridors, but she could still hear the gossip. She was used to whispers forming around her.

“Lorelei, did you confirm Haven News would be in attendance tonight?” Opal asked as the sprite handed her a bottle of mineral water.

“Haven News?” Lorelei’s ditzy face showed no sign of recognizing. “I didn’t know you could call the news.”

Opal stopped, her whole pack of attendants freezing with her. “Excuse me?”

Lorelei twitched a wing and stammered, realizing she had made a mistake even if she didn’t know what it had been. “I-- I didn’t know you could just call the news.”

The group hushed, knowing that Opal would make a scene. Another one of Opal’s secretaries elbowed in from the back of the pack. It was one of the she-pixies that she had personally recruited from her private school days.

“I made the call instead,” she said. “Haven News will have live audio/video, Atlantis Net will grab video for re-broadcast, and the People’s Community Crier is planning on recording audio for soundbites.”

Opal smiled. “Good. Lorelei, calm down.”

The sprite had begun crying silently, narrow shoulders shaking. Opal patted her head.

“Next time I give you a serious job, you should remind me that you can’t handle it,” Opal said. “I can’t complain about your work as a serving-fairy, but it is so easy to forget that you aren’t capable of much else.”

“Yes, Miss Koboi,” Lorelei said, unaware that she had just been insulted.

The group kept moving after that. Opal had to make one last meeting with the biotechnology department. They passed out of the core labs into the recently built biotech wing. It had all been constructed two years ago by excavating a deep cylinder into bedrock. The structure built within was an multilevel octagon of durable polymers and reinforced steel that let visitors see the walls of rock that surrounded it. while being entirely hermetically sealed. Even the elevator at the center of the building carefully managed foreign contaminants, equalizing air pressure through its own sterilized supply of compressed gas.

As she descended, Opal watched the scientists at work within her labs, trying to judge them in a single glance as her father would have done. They seemed to focus on their work, but that could have been a result of her own presence. Her real focus lay on the lower, more restricted levels.

The lead scientists on her secret project met her at a small table on the bottom floor. There was space to sit for her and two others, but the rest had no authority to speak unless spoken to.

The lead scientist on this project was a gnome-goblin hybrid. Opal had selected Dr. Sheolla Ginash from a dozen other better-qualified applicants because of her checkered past: a ward of the state who displayed average grades all the way until graduate school, when she had developed an abnormal obsession with hybridization that was undoubtedly related to her own birth origins. Her work had been ground-breaking and of immaculate quality, strengthening even further as she fixated on it. Dr. Ginash’s personal investment made her the perfect asset, a willing tool that only improved with use.

“The process was successful following immersion in a solution of two specific compounds,” Dr. Ginash said.

Koboi turned the page on the packet she had been provided. “I read here that the status of the bio-field had no measurable effect on fertilization. Why is that?”

The second researcher at the table took the reins on that answer. “The previous theory held that hybridization between fairy Families was less common because of mismatching bio-fields. However, we have determined that the 20-year lock is the only input that matters, and it can be defeated with our formulation.”

Dr. Ginash blinked slowly over lidded reptilian eyes. “The compounds that you provided were key for our discovery. They disabled the protein-locks on the sample egg and allowed the provided male sample to achieve positive results.”

“Good,” Opal said. “Very good. When will you begin synthesizing these components?”

The scientists hesitated, looking to each other to see who would stick their neck out.

“The complexity of these chemicals exceeds our industrial standards,” Dr. Ginash said, with none of the nervousness of her colleagues. “We are unable to produce more.”

Opal looked into the stare that Dr. Ginash offered her. They were all aware of the shortcomings of Koboi Chemical. There was not much of a reason to improve chemical manufacturing because most Fairies chose warlocks and their magical synthesis, even with its higher rate of impurities.

“KoboiChem is about to receive a serious incentive to improve their capabilities. While that happens, I expect implantation to move into the trial stage,” Opal told the team. “I can continue providing those compounds in limited amounts.”

“We will need research subjects.” Dr. Ginash was thinking ahead.

“I will provide a research subject only when this lab has demonstrated the ability to reliably perform these procedures.”

The lab team agreed with Opal’s plans, and the meeting ended with a level of excitement that seemed at odds with their formality. Officially, the whole research team was working on repopulating endangered Earth mammals. The reality was that the only endangered mammals they were interested in were fairies.

Some, like Dr. Ginash, were focused on hybridization as the future of fairy life. Others had strong political attachments to the idea of the resurgent People, believing that inducing overpopulation would lead fairies to take back the surface. They were all renegades against the status quo and trusted Opal to fulfill their desires through her reputation as an iron-willed genius.

For the present moment, Opal knew all that she needed to know. She left the genetics wing confident for that evening. She would be announcing the opening of a new department for Koboi Industries. Koboi Natalics would offer fairies the ability to control their reproduction for the first time after their retreat below the surface. Of course, she was years from being able to follow through on her promise, but the announcement itself would be significant,

She visited her own staff of hairdressers and beauticians just before the press conference.

“I hardly need to add anything,” one beautician said. “Miss Koboi is the picture of healthful youth.”

Opal took pleasure at that. She had applied her own cosmetics that morning, and there were only a few touch-ups needed to make sure that she looked her best for the camera.

“Do you mind if I ask your routine, Miss Koboi?” one asked her as she adjusted a layer of holograph-friendly foundation.

“I would tell you, but I’m afraid it would be no good. It’s very experimental.”

“Wow. You’re so lucky.”

“Don’t I know it.” She punctuated her statement with a giggle. She would be emphasizing her girlish charm this evening. A powerful, fully-fledged she-fairy still made the older members of the People nervous, but who could get mad at a girl just trying to make it in the world?

She made her announcement in the entryway of Koboi Industries, using the centuries old architecture to strengthen her visual connection to the fairies of the past. Her speech was short and to the point, but she allowed time for questions. The first person was a he-pixie.

“Hi, I’m Onyx Boothlix, with Haven News. How does your research remain legal given the extensive legal restrictions on fairy research?”

“That’s an important question, Onyx,” Opal said. “There will be no magic involved during our trials, so we avoid the actual ban enacted in 1533. Most of our experimentation is performed to encourage the reproduction of endangered terrestrial mammals.”

The next question came from a bookish elf.

“Iris Stock, PCC. Six months ago, you claimed that your objective with Koboi Industries was nothing other than the ‘complete subjugation of commerce in the Lower Elements’. How can the People invest their deeply personal futures in your new Natalics initiative if it will be used as part of corporate competition?”

Opal took a second look at the reporter. She was from the People’s Community Crier, a print publication known for its nosy journalists. It would be important to keep tabs on her.

“I call it Koboi Natalics because I own and operate it. However, I will keep it completely separated on the financial and organizational level from Koboi Industries.”  
  
Opal took a breath and swallowed her pride.

“The statement I made last year was unfortunately worded, and for that I apologize. The only reason I would want Koboi Industries to dominate trade is because I know it is the best company in all of the Lower Elements. Shouldn’t I provide the best in businesses as well as our families?”

The reporter grumbled and sat down. A third person stood to ask a question, a she-pixie who looked distinctly friendly. Opal suspected it was an affectation.

“Nephra Claris, with _Pizkie Quarterly_. I find it curious that you claim that your new business will supply fertility services equally, even though you have previously expressed open disapproval of certain social institutions such as Pixie Marriages.”

Opal had known someone like this would come out of the woodwork. She had a phase in college where she became involved in anti-Contract activism. It was mainly writing editorials for the student paper and funding advertisements, but it had been the closest she had ever been to being civic-minded. Of course, it still got her in trouble with the conservatives among her kind.

“I will be honest; I still disapprove of Contract Marriage. I cannot tolerate the fact that it requires that married she-pixies act in complete deference to males. Have you never wondered why the pixie population is actually decreasing over time? What kind of pixie would want to live their life in total submission? ”

The reporter looked down at her feet, cowed by Opal’s force.

“Even still, Koboi Natalics will provide services equally to all fairies, even those under contract marriages. We will, however, require the active consent of all patients who come for treatment. In my opinion, if pixies can choose to conceive at any point in time, they will not need contracts to ensure a pair will remain together. Koboi Natalics will bring true freedom to all fairies of the Lower Elements.”

_All except one_ , she admitted to herself.

After the press had cleared out and she allowed her staff to return home for the day, Opal found some time for herself. She returned to her office to check her ‘special room’. Holly and Artemis were still feuding with each other. It had taken them weeks, but they had finally realized what she was trying to do.

Captain Short was a proud officer of an elite LEP division. Her mother had instilled a respect for life, even human life, but her career had shown her the excesses of mud men from up close, creating a substantial distaste for them, as if they were pitiable animals.

Artemis Fowl had convinced her that some Mud Men could be trusted after years of mutual assistance. Captain Short lived a lonely life, and Artemis Fowl was one of the few figures of note to enter it from outside the LEP. Of course, it would be massively inappropriate to develop romantic feelings for the Mud Boy who had once kidnapped her, but Holly was a known renegade.

That’s where Opal saw her chance. Time-Travel destabilized everything that separated Holly from her elfin impulses. Losing to Opal had further eroded the social ties that restricted her behavior. Her intimacy with Artemis had become increasingly sensual as external pressure increased.

The first obstacle had arrived when Artemis revealed Opal’s main goal for her captives. She wanted to see them become closer. She wanted to have them breed in captivity. Artemis had discovered her plan and boosted Holly’s resistance, and now they were keeping their distance.

In response to this shunning, Artemis dedicated himself to working on enchanting the torc. He sat at the table all day after exercises, slowly developing the ability to weave spells into the golden loop.

Holly had no such way to fill her time, and she could only train for a certain period. She was beginning to waste away in silence. Opal thought that Holly had even stopped working towards escape. She decided to send them a treat. It would give her something to watch while she ate her own food in her office.

A packaged survival ‘cake’ was sent from a storage room adjacent to their cell, the delivery drone dropping it on the table in front of Artemis.

“Dessert has arrived,” Artemis said, looking at label of the food. “It appears to be orange flavor.”

Holly split the cake in two and handed one half to Artemis. He took it, hesitating.

The treat was dry and crumbled easily, but Opal could notice their moods improving. She pulled a foil package from a cabinet in her desk. She had prepared for this moment by taking an extra cake with her to the Lower Elements. After checking to make sure she was alone, Opal tore open the wrapping and began to nibble on her own cake as she watched her guests through the screen.

“So you like oranges,” Holly said. “What’s the story behind that?”

“A story?” Artemis stopped eating. “I was not aware that my preferences for fruit were worthy of their own narrative.”

“They don’t have many fruits in Haven. They’re worth their weight in gold, so if you buy something, it means you really enjoy it.”

Artemis looked thoughtfully into the distance. “I suppose I could at least identify where I began to enjoy oranges above other fruits.”

“Go ahead,” Holly said. Opal also leaned forward in her chair. She could still recall Artemis’ story about orangeries.

“My family went on holiday along the Adriatic Coast of Italy when I was quite young. My father joined us, which was very rare in the days before his disappearance. We spent time in Venice, but my first encounter with oranges was in Apulia, a rural province further south. There is a certain promontory that emerges from the coast, and all sorts of produce are grown there. Thanks to the climate, even the citrus trees can be harvested from all year long.”

“No greenhouse needed.”

“Indeed,” Artemis said. “It was summer, and we were touring certain farms, walking the dusty paths within them. I became so tired that my father had to carry me back to our yacht. Then, as the sun began to set, each member of the family had an orange, picked fresh from the groves. It was the first time I peeled fruit for myself.”

Opal knew the memory from when she had siphoned it. Artemis left out the fact that he had just thrown a tantrum about having to spend the day out and about on his feet, or that he had torn his orange so badly that he had to ask his mother for hers.

“The day shifted slowly into night as the ship bobbed in the waves. The sunlight grew reddish as it descended over the pale green of the groves and cast deep shadows along the coast. It felt almost as if we were eating the sunset. The moment was too brief. My father had urgent business to attend to, so we took a jet back to Ireland. I have never returned since.”

“It sounded beautiful.”

“In recent days, I have dreamed about it often,” Artemis confessed. “Has anyone ever told you that you carry the natural fragrance of oranges?”

Holly guffawed. “Most fairies aren’t so kind about it, and even elves don’t compare it to fruit.”

“Ah, but you tasted so sweet.” Artemis said with confidence.

Holly responded with a hostile stare. “What are you doing? We talked about this. When Opal was here, we were both off balance. I did things that I should not have done, and you were in no state to refuse. It was my mistake. I need to focus on escape. You need to focus on improving yourself. Anything else is playing Opal’s game.”

Opal watched as Artemis’ confidence evaporated and he went back to working on his torc, dejected. Poor Artemis was an adult who had starved himself of anything other than his intellect. And now that his libido was being stimulated through diet and environment, his newfound sexual desires were stymied by the one person he could have partnered with.

There was an opening there for Opal. It would get her hands dirty, but Opal was beginning to believe that it wasn’t such a bad thing.


	14. Chapter 14

Weeks passed, each day reduced to routines of boredom. Artemis’s strength grew, but Holly found it impossible to see because he spent all of his time hunched over the project Opal had assigned him. If she hadn’t worn it herself, Holly might have suspected the torc was cursed, drawing its beholder into its curling golden cirle. Artemis had spent every waking hour staring at it, touching it, and casting spells into it. Even when he bathed and ate, it would be kept nearby.

Holly had nothing to do but sit nearby or lay on the hard floor and daydream. Artemis hardly spoke to her and when he did, the things they discussed were rarely as interesting or personal as they had been before Arty had made the disturbing revelation that their captivity was part of Opal’s plan to have them deeply involved. The coldness that had come between them after that evening almost made Holly reconsider.

_Would it be so bad?_ Holly wondered. _He knows that elves my age prefer to keep things casual. He might not get too attached._

Elfin couples could last for as long as 20 years before things were considered ‘serious’ in the eyes of others. If they were locked down here for two decades, larger problems would be at hand than whether she was taking it too quickly with him.

She watched him as he worked, bare-backed and with his hair tied loosely behind his head with threads he had salvaged from his jacket. If she closed her eyes, she could summon a mental image of that back bent over her, his hands engaged with her own charms instead of Opal’s metal trinket. She had to remind herself that her reckless imagination was a product of her captivity. If she wasn’t locked up with Artemis and in danger, she suspected that there would have been no sexual attraction at all.

She just didn’t feel that way about Mud Men. Certain deviant fairies developed fetishes for humans, but it was socially unacceptable to even mention the existence of such things. She remembered someone from back in her school days who had kept a little sketchbook to draw in from time to time. She left it behind in the classroom one day, and the custodial staff found it and looked through it. It was filled with sexually explicit images of fairies and humans in all sorts of configurations and positions. As soon as their school found out, the artist was sent into alternate education for immediate counseling.

It was the last thing you would have expected of the student, a mild-mannered she-gnome who looked out at the world from behind thick spectacles. The class had struggled to understand what could have driven her to it. Plenty of kinks existed in the fairy world, but to look at humans and see potential sexual partners was considered the height of degeneracy.

Humans were murderers and despoilers who were known to hold nothing as sacred-- a fairy who offered their body to a human was undoubtedly self-destructive. Mud People were larger, which meant that they easily dominated and physically controlled their smaller partners. Their lives were short and thus their intelligence was less developed-- the recent understanding was that a fairy would be having sex with a being that was a few behavioral steps above an animal.

Holly rolled onto her side to face away from Artemis. “D’Arvit.” Thinking about the fact that her attraction was forbidden had begun to turn her on. Holly would admit it to no one, but she had found degradation to be sexually exciting ever since entering LEPrecon.

During her Academy years, she had to fight every day to be respected, but after obtaining an elite assignment, the idea that she was a top officer in her department and an inspiration for others had given her a social position of importance. That social value gave her an addictive sense of vertigo when she allowed herself to stray close to the edges of acceptability.

_Just like when Opal made me say that I liked kissing Mud Boys._ Holly thought. Even the remembrance made her bring her legs closer together, feeling herself become more sensitive. She decided to experiment.

“My name is Holly Short, and I like kissing Mud Boys.” She whispered the words to herself but still felt its effect winding across her body.

Drawn by an unbearable gravity, Holly’s hand reached for her pussy and she felt herself already getting wet before her body responded to her own touch, growing warm and full against her fingers. Touching herself had been a mistake, she knew. She shouldn’t be getting turned on, locked up alone with a Mud Man that craved her body. Even worse, they had spent day after day together, nearly naked-- she imagined the eyes that had once looked on her with admiration now looked lewdly at her exposed body.

The thoughts fogged her head with a dirty desperation. Relief would be so easy-- she could turn to Artemis and call him over, or return his favor from earlier and climb under the table. Even easier, she could fuck herself here and now with her own fingers while Artemis was focused so deeply on his work.

_He won’t hear me,_ Holly told herself. _Too wrapped up in being a good Mud Boy for that pixie._

She was frustrated in more ways than one. It hurt to see her friend working for the benefit of their greatest enemy, and it hurt that their friendship had turned into a sexual stand-off.

Rather than reflect on that, it was a lot easier just to finger herself in the corner. Maybe it wasn’t true that elves had higher libidos than others, but Holly needed relief and had just run out of willpower.

She let her middle finger plunge in first, slowly. The feeling was more intense than typical, even without access to the toys she would have had back home. So much of it was in the situation. She shifted her free hand out from under her side and sent it across her body, closing her eyes and trying to let her thoughts drift free for the moment. She added her ring finger, using the heel of her hand to rub down onto her clit while her fingers pushed in and out.

Her mind was filled with thoughts of Artemis. It hardly made sense to her. She was under a self-imposed sexual embargo with the man, but there was nothing else that really came to mind. She blamed it on all of the training that they had been doing. Artemis had always operated a self-possessed form of grace, but all of the physical training and exercise they had been doing together was starting to enhance his physicality. The muscles of his upper body were gaining definition. Holly imagined what his grip strength would be like now, how his large hands would feel as they held her, grasping her for leverage as he surged against her. Then she remembered how Opal had forced his hands against her body, and jealousy threatened to sour the moment.

Inflamed by the heat of the moment, she embraced a sudden possessive streak within herself. The pixie had no claim to him. Artemis was hers. The thought grew as she thought of everything she had taught him. Holly remembered the press of his lips against her breasts when she put him in headlocks for demonstration, or how she had brought him pleasure underneath the table. She fondled a nipple, reminding herself that she could teach Artemis pretty much everything about her body.

Maybe without Opal getting in the way, she could really put him to the test on oral sex-- she would grab fistfuls of his hair as his eyes looked up at her, she would rest his throbbing length in her open mouth, tasting him for a moment before she really got to work, teasing him while his eyes begged for relief. She felt her pleasure building as she went through scenarios. She imagined riding him, straddling his human dick and driving it into herself, controlling the rocking rhythm that would dig deeper into herself with each thrust.

Holly increased her own tempo, feeling herself swollen in full bloom as her fingers rubbed up inside of her, her hand coated in wetness. The pleasure built up but rather than make a sound, she just intensified her movement. Her fingers flashed in and out, until she felt herself on the verge of orgasm. Once she felt herself peak, she switched her fingers to her clit, frigging it across the finish line. She came hard, her teeth locking as she swallowed her moan.

“Holly?” She heard Artemis ask, his voice barely edging through the internal cascade of pleasure.

She looked over her shoulder, hoping she hadn’t been too obvious.

“Are you alright?” He had looked aside from his work.

“Yesh,” she said, her words sluggish in the afterglow.

He stood up, silhouetted against the ceiling lights.

“I’m fine,” she said.

He walked over. _Had the table always been that close to her?_ She sat up, back to the wall.

“Hey, I’m fine. You don’t need to--”

And then he was right next to her. She had been so wrapped up in her own head that his immediacy was shocking. He crouched next to her and touched her forehead.

“Elevated temperature.”

Two of his fingers pressed to one side of her wrist, feeling the pulse there. Holly did not stop him.

“Elevated heart rate, as well.”

He took her hand. Holly realized that her fingers were still covered in her juices. Then she saw Artemis looking at them without surprise, and she understood what was happening. _He knew what I was up to the entire time._

He let go of her hand, but she kept it where it had been, palm-out. He smirked and then knelt over her, her legs slipping under him. He brought his mouth closed on her index finger and sucked, his tongue large enough to roll around it. When he looked up, Holly saw Artemis’ need in every part of his face. She could have predicted this. Maybe she had, and allowed it to happen anyway.

She let Artemis lick the rest of her hand clean. He had not been lying when he said he enjoyed the taste of her. She felt herself stirring again. This was the exact situation she had spent weeks avoiding. Would she throw all of that work away? As if hearing her own internal hesitation, Artemis pulled back and waited to see her next decision.

His shadow covered her as he waited in silence to see how she would act. It did not take long for her to make her decision.

“D’Arvit,” she cursed, and then pulled his head closer to kiss.

Her mouth first closed on his lower lip, and then she met his lips straight on. She sat up a little straighter against the wall to give him an easier angle and their tongues met playfully.

They pulled back for a moment. Holly ran her hand through his hair.

“You know what? I really fucking enjoy kissing Mud Men,” Holly said. They came back together, and Holly pressed forward until her teeth clicked against his.

Her words had brought an intensity to the actions between them. Artemis placed a hand on her breast, cupping while they kissed. She voiced her approval and reached for his dick. It pushed against his underwear and she found it stiff under her hand as she guided it out. She rolled the skin away from his head and spread the warm pre-cum with her thumb. She wanted the thing she held in her hand-- it felt like she was aching inside for it.

Holly pulled her feet from underneath Artemis and sat her legs up on his kneeling thighs, their hips becoming closer together. He squeezed a breast and pushed himself closer, his dick prodding through her improvised clothing. She lifted her rear off the floor so that she could pull the draping cloth upward, baring her pussy even while the skirt remained fastened around her waist. Her ankles pulled him closer in by the small of his back. She was using the wall behind her to support herself.

She was still soaking wet from earlier. She felt more than ready-- she was impatient.

“Come on,” she coaxed, lifting her hips. “Come on, Arty, I’m right here.”

He looked downwards, trying to line himself up with her pussy. His dick pressed against her, but it was not quite right.

“Lower than that,” she told him. When he wasn’t quick enough, she gave him a helping hand.

“Ah,” he said, feeling his tip finally go in.

Holly kept drawing him in, applying light pressure on his lower back to remind him to keep going. He pushed further and further in, and she exhaled with relief at the feeling as his tip spread her, followed by the rest of his dick. Once he stopped, she felt filled, almost to the back. She felt lucky that Artemis wasn’t bigger-- it was already a miracle that they had space at all to move.

“Good,” she told him. Artemis was wide-eyed, shocked by the feeling as her walls shifted around him. She felt his heat dearly in their small, bare room.

Holly drew his face closer and planted a kiss on him. He returned it, and they were connected both above and below, idling in that feeling of warmth.

He drew his length partway out and then sent it back in, getting a feel for things. Holly encouraged Artemis with little moans, and he picked up the pace, learning to angle his thrusts to make up for the lack of space.

“Oh, god,” he said, the words forcing themselves out of him as he learned to thrust.

“It’s good, right?” she whispered. “Touch me.”

His hand fumbled to her belly, then dropped lower until he was right over the spot where his dick dug into her. His hand settled over her mons and he brushed his thumb downwards, trying to find her clit. Once he made contact, the jolt of pleasure she felt made her laugh. Artemis responded by intensifying the rubbing and the speed he was rocking his dick into her. That combination really got her off.

Each time his dick slipped backwards, she felt her pussy trying to hold it in, her tightness combining with his larger dimensions as a human. He kept up a pattern with his thumb, circles changing direction as he pressed and nudged in all directions. Her voice raised up, moans almost like grunts. She was way too close to coming, and the sounds she was making reminded Holly why it had been so long since the last time she fucked-- she liked it too much.

She looked into his eyes. His expression was set with determination as he focused on her. One of her eyes was in his head, and one of his was in hers. There would always be a part of them within each other. Holly threw her arms around Artemis, practically lifting herself off the ground in her search to get closer. He matched her movement, a hand cupping her cheek as he placed his forehead on hers, bracing her against the wall as his pace grew frantic.

“Holly, I...” he couldn’t find his words. “You... _damn!”_

Their eyes were locked, close range. Skin on skin, breath on breath, force against force.

“Yes, do it!” she said to him, her voice forced out into a grunt. “Harder!”

His hips bucked to her call, his attempts on her clit becoming disordered. The entire heel of his hand pressed her as he finally lost control.

He drove his dick in with a loud groan. She felt it jump once within her and then she let be carried away on her own wave of pleasure. He thrusted one last time, heaving her upward with his hips. She let go in surprise and he was thrown off balance. He fell on his back and Holly had to brace herself against his abdomen to keep from tumbling.

The sudden shift in position and amount of velocity sent Artemis’ dick deeper than it had ever been from below, impacting the back for just a moment before they both came. Artemis made wordless sounds of pure relief as he orgasmed, seed jetting out of him after weeks unsatisfied. Holly felt it splash out within her as she sat on him, knees involuntarily digging above his hip-bones. She had never felt someone come like that before, and the surprise made her orgasm a little more lightheaded than usual. She moved her hips back and forth, feeling Artemis’ dick soften. Fluid began to drip out of her.

“Frond, if that wasn’t good for your first try,” Holly said, lifting herself off of his dick with a _pop._ His come poured out of her. It would have been an impossible amount for a fairy, so it was no wonder to her that she still felt its heat deeper inside of her.

“Is this a normal amount?” she pointed to the deluge, but he could barely look at it through heavy eyelids. She often forgot that few people had her stamina.

“Aw, you really were giving it your all, huh?” she said, scooting up his torso so that she could lie down and kiss him. The afterglow took away any sense of urgency, so they could lie there an exchange deep kisses without the tongue-wrestling of earlier.

Artemis was the first to break off.

“I would have preferred this without her camera,” he said.

“I would have preferred a bed of grass in the shade of an oak tree,” she said. “But we get what we have.”

She sat back and realized she was still leaking come onto his groin. Artemis watched her dripping opening in fascination.

“Yeah, that’s mostly your work down there,” she told him, spreading her legs to give him a better view. “I’m absolutely stuffed full of it.”

Holly rubbed his chest with affection. He caught her hand and drew her in for another kiss.

“I’m making a mess all over you,” she said.  
  
“That hardly matters to me,” he said, before kissing her again. His lips were insistent upon hers, his mouth hungry, thirsting for more contact.

He looked at her, almost crazed. “Holly, I think I...”

She silenced him with her own lips, cursing herself. Cursing Opal.

_No, don’t say that here,_ she thought. _Don’t start that here, of all places. Not now, of all times._

She had already gone too far. If Artemis confessed his feelings to her just then, it would irreparably damage them both. If he said those words, Holly knew they would never be able to return to their old selves when they got free. They were both still young; this imprisonment did not have to demand their lives. They could go back to being good friends, just like the elves back home did when their relationships burned out. Only as long as he didn’t say the _L_ word.

Artemis must have felt her resolute denial. His passions calmed. Holly dismounted him and headed to the shower. Once they had both bathed, another packaged cake got delivered.

‘VANILLA POUND CAKE’ the label read, and it seemed that Opal had laser-etched a winking cartoon face onto it and an arrow pointing to the word ‘pound’.

“I would not have thought her regression had reached the point of sophomoric puns,” Artemis said.

Holly stayed silent as she munched the cake. _Artemis is missing the point_ , she thought. _She wants us to know she’s been watching._

When they went to sleep, Holly made a point of remaining in her own corner. She felt Artemis’ eyes boring into her back as she slept.

_You won’t have to wait too long, Arty. I’m almost ready to get us out of here._


	15. Chapter 15

Even though he had showered several times in the days after his unexpected intimacy with Holly, Artemis was still surrounded by her scent. He remembered the smoothness of her skin, the give of their flesh as they pressed together. It got in the way of his enchantment work on the torc, which normally required all of the focus he could give it as he continued to overlay spells into it.

Outside of going to the bathroom, Holly did not really move much after they were done working out for the day. Artemis feared that she was slipping into some form of catatonic state due to a lack of stimulus, but he could not determine how to resolve the situation. Their conversations had grown short and brittle, and she had become uncooperative with his attempts at oral stimulation using riddles and puzzles.

To give credit to Holly, Artemis had also become hesitant with regards to their socialization. She had become strangely cold afterward, and he lacked the experience to bridge that gap. Opal had not even spoken to them after leaving. Who were Artemis Fowl and Holly Short without a villain to defeat? Just a human and a fairy woman with decades more years of life. What could they possibly hold in common outside of their enemies?

When Opal arrived, he was happy to see her. He barely internalized how twisted the thought was.

“How is my favorite Mud Boy?” she said, boisterous as she strolled in. “And you, too, Poppy. This must be the first time you’ve taken off of work in decades.”

Artemis ignored the jabs and held up the torc he had been working on.

“I’ve done as you asked, Opal. It’s only right that we gain some concessions.”

Opal was shorter than even a seated Artemis, so she climbed up on the table to hold her hand over the torc, sensing the magic energy within.

“Hmmph,” she said, hiding her surprise poorly. “I guess elf snatch isn’t the only thing you can pack full of your essence.”

Holly hissed in anger and Opal waggled her fingers in her direction. “Oh yes, Poppy. What have you been doing all this time, other than fingering yourself in irresponsible places?”

“You’ll find out soon,” Holly said. “Real soon.”

Opal laughed. “If you insist. Just remember who holds the leash on your boy here. It would really be a shame if you tried something before your clothes got here. Escaping would do you no good if you died of exposure.”

This prison must not be in a tropical climate, Artemis thought. Desert nights can kill with their low temperatures, but I suspect Opal is referring to an extended period of cold. The Southern Hemisphere has a few locations that could serve as candidates but are too far separated from Haven. Has she interned us in Siberia? Or perhaps in the Canadian North?

Opal observed Artemis thinking. “You’re trying to find out where we could be. Too bad that hex will keep you where I want you.”

“I believe I’ve earned a bed for us,” Artemis said, changing the subject.

Opal took the bait, planting her hands on her hips, trying to stare him down from the table. “Beds? You already have clothes coming and you’re asking for beds? Don’t be ungrateful.”

“Oh, I am very grateful,” Artemis said. “But imagine how grateful I would be if we received even a single bed. With rest, I could double my work on that torc, perhaps even triple it.”

Opal looked confused. “Why would I care how much more labor you give that thing?”

Opal’s lack of interest in the torc did not make sense to Artemis. It had been his plan.

“I don’t care about the torc itself,” she said. “It was just something to keep you busy and develop your ability to channel magic. Did you think my end goal for you is a sweatshop for magical artifacts?”

Artemis had obsessed over the torc. He had thought that the golden ornament could be a useful negotiating tool with the more effort he put into it. It had been a thing of hope.

She does not want a valuable artifact, Artemis realized. She only wants an obedient magic user.

“Aw, is little Arty shocked?” Opal asked. “I’ve told Holly before, you’re not playing crunchball against the old team.”

How could I let myself be drawn in by that? It was an elementary mistake to assume it could earn us some comforts.

“Okay, I’ll take pity on you,” Opal said. “You’ll get your bed, but you have to satisfy two of my conditions.”

“What are they?”

“Patience, patience. We’ll do them one at a time,” she said, looking down at Artemis. “First, you have to kiss my feet.”

Artemis had predicted he would be asked to do something like this. Opal could force him to do any act, so she would prioritize his voluntary degradation as soon as he offered cooperation. He checked Holly’s reaction behind him, but she was keeping her face blank, an ability likely derived from years in the Academy and policing the streets of Haven.

“Why are you looking at that she-elf?” Opal snapped. “I’m right here.”

She stuck a leg out in front of her, bare foot about level with his neck. He would just have to pucker his lips and look down, and she would have her wish. It needs no further complications, Artemis thought. It will not be sexual or degrading. It will be a simple act. It is not a betrayal.

Artemis could recognize himself coping with the act. He knew Opal had him under a geas of obedience, but it would not fully activate unless he received a direct order. He was unable to determine how much of the impulse to comply came from the hex and how much was his desire to gain at least one more morsel of comforts.

Opal shook her foot in impatience, her toes brushing his neck just by the larynx. By locking me in this box, Opal has hobbled my ability to strategize. I cannot tell the difference between magic and material pressures on my decision-making. Strategy is now useless. All that remains is economics: What will I gain? What will I lose?

He kissed the top of Opal’s foot. It was a sudden and passionless act and he did his best to ignore the sweet aroma of her perfume, like red peppers and cinnamon as it flooded his nostrils. She laughed as his face twisted.

“Well, aren’t you a good Mud Boy?” she teased, dismounting the table. “You’re halfway to earning your bed.”

Artemis knew he would find the second task even more distasteful than the first. “What is your next request?”

Opal pointed at Holly. “I want to watch you get intimate with your friend over there.”

At the very idea of performing that act, Artemis’ gut soured with a mix of anxiety and shame. All of his willingness to cooperate disappeared in a sudden resurgence of his pride.

“You already have a recording,” he said. “Surely you have not become bored with that so soon?”

Opal seemed to take exception to that. Her eyebrow twitched.

“I have plenty of recordings, Arty, and I don’t become ‘bored’ with any of them,” she said, indignant. “You asked for a bed, and now I want to make sure you’ll make good use of it.”

If I continue stalling, she may lose interest, Artemis thought.

“How am I to demonstrate the utility of a bed without actually having one here?”

Opal’s eyes tightened with hostility. “Don’t be such a pedant, Arty. I gave you a table, use it.”

She had been more frustrated than Artemis could have predicted.

“Come on, Poppy, bring that elfin ass of yours down here,” she said, snapping her fingers. “Mommy’s losing her patience.”

To Artemis’ surprise, Holly obeyed the order. She had never been so cooperative before. She stood next to Artemis, and placed a reassuring hand on his thigh, right where his underwear ended. Her touch excited him, even though he could still feel Opal’s malevolent presence on the other side.

“That’s a good girl,” Opal said. “Now, up on the table with you, I don’t have all night.”

Opal sat on the other end of the table and Holly leaped up onto its surface. Artemis did not understand her current willingness, but his doubts were assuaged when she made eye contact.

“Trust me,” she whispered. He stood up and found that the height of the table put them at near equivalent heights.

She gave her clothing a forceful yank to free it from her body and tossed it to the side of the room. Artemis was too caught up in her body to notice as she slipped a hand in the waistband of his boxers and pulled down. Obviously, she couldn’t remove them by herself, but Artemis took her impatience as a sign and also disrobed, kicking his feet free of the boxers. It perturbed him to note that he was well on his way to being fully erect. He had never seen himself as someone who could be aroused in open exhibition.

He was able to see Opal leaning in from across the table, practically licking her lips in anticipation. Holly blocked his view by placing her forehead against his.

“I would have preferred this without the audience,” Artemis said.

Holly smirked. “I’ll take what I can get. If it gets us a bed, I’m more than willing to show off a little. You know, give her a taste of what she’ll never have.”

Artemis grinned at the thought of Opal yearning for something that she would never truly possess. There was no magic that would give her what he and Holly had.

He kissed her, both arms embracing her, one around her waist and another supporting her back as she leaned into him, her nipples pressing into his chest. She rubbed them against his chest, and he felt them harden as they brushed again and again over his chest hair.

One of her hands went between his legs, spending just a moment to cup his balls before finding his erection.

“Good,” she said, running her hand along its underside. “I’ll need some more help before I’m ready, though.”

Artemis understood what she meant. He moved one hand to start at her ankle and work its way up, letting his fingers trail along the back of her firm calves and then along the inside of a thigh. She changed her stance to be a little wider when his hand finally reached the inviting warmth of her gate.

Holly leaned back onto him as he began to focus on stroking and rubbing her to action, using her forearms to support herself against his shoulders.

“That’s good,” she said between hungry kisses. “Get my clit, too.”

Already familiar with her body, Artemis found it quite easy to zero in on her clitoris. His hand pressed into her hair as his thumb was dedicated to stimulating her sensitive bud. His other hand hooked around her leg to come at her from below, a single index finger enough to stimulate the most delightful sounds from Holly.

Making inferences based on comparative anatomy, Artemis directed his pointer finger against the ventral surface of her inner walls, feeling for a rough patch of especially sensitive tissue. Once he felt her close down on his finger, he knew he had found the spot, and focused on it as his finger moved in and out. He only was able to enjoy his discovery for a brief while before Holly was patting his shoulder, telling him to stop.

She turned to give access to her round derriere to him. The results of his literal handiwork trickled down her thigh. Holly squatted, hanging her rear partway off the edge of the table. She looked at him over one shoulder, daring.  
“Let’s see if you can fuck me from below,” she said. As before, her use of profanity deeply aroused Artemis.

It was even harder to find her entrance when he was pressed against her back, his erection bouncing along below in a fruitless search. Again, Holly had to help guide him. Once his tip was rolled into her folds, Artemis pushed his hips forward and up to get his member fully engulfed in warmth and wetness.

Holly moaned. “Ah, yes.”

Artemis picked that unfortunate time to look up from Holly’s body and saw Opal. It was not as if she had been hiding, but Artemis had found it simple to push her presence to a far corner of his mind. Yet there she was, with a dangerous look on her face and a sharp focus in her eyes that would alternate between his face and Holly’s body. One of her hands was below the table, out of sight. The very idea that she could be touching herself made Artemis cease moving entirely.

Holly had been facing Opal and no doubt had already observed their captor’s behavior. When Artemis stopped moving, she took up the slack, raising up out of her squat and then descending back onto him, his erection stiff enough to act as a guiding rod.

“Come... on!” she said, panting with need. “Put some spirit into it.”

Artemis complied.

Let the pixie watch, he thought. This is the one thing that we hold exclusive possession of now.

In this room, denied of any comfort, the only welcoming things were the bodies of each other. Artemis had lusted over Holly for these long weeks, seen the curves of her body and had been protected by her strength. Just once had not been enough. Not even this second encounter would slake his thirst.

He wrapped a protective arm around Holly and held onto a breast. It provided him with leverage as he began to send thrust after thrust into her. Her walls pulled him in and tightened greedily as if to stop him. The sensations brought sounds out of him, little gasping groans as the feeling intensified.

Holly was exceptionally more vocal this time. She moaned loudly and continually exhorted him to move with fiercer and faster movements.

“Deeper!” she would cry, and then would curse in the low-throated tone Artemis knew she reserved for sex and anger. “That’s so good.”

To his dismay, Holly seemed to be using her vocalizations against Opal, who was now quite obviously moving her arm under the table. He did not think anything good could come from antagonizing her, but vigorous sex prevented him from beginning a dialogue.

Even though her squatting position could be physically strenuous, Holly was moving her hips downwards to meet his. Thus, it was inevitable that he would go deep enough and she would drive herself down to the point that he touched her cervix. It had not been his goal; all that he had read regarding the physiology of sex suggested contact was inadvisable in most situations. Even so, as his tip pushed slowly up into her own downwards movement, Holly let out a full-throated moan of pleasure and her grip spasmed tighter around his base. He almost had his orgasm, right then and there, taking a few slow cycles to bring himself down.

Artemis repositioned his legs so that he would have an easier time reaching that depth, and tried again, slowly withdrawing his rod to about half-way, and then sending it in with trepidation. It took considerable willpower to withhold the speed and force of earlier, but he knew that going any faster would have him spilling his seed too early. Holly leaned back against his torso to improve his angle, legs splaying wider against the table. One of her arms went up so that she could support herself on the ridge of his shoulder, but the other hand dedicated itself to stimulating her clitoris, four fingers rubbing the top of her vulva. The tempo of her voice increased in his ears as he slow-fucked his way to a surreal level of pleasure.

Holly had dropped the verbal feints at Opal, it was just beast-like sounds that emerged now. Artemis pushed upwards, feeling the slight open-ness just before he reached the back. He proceeded gently, afraid to cause any pain, pressing in slowly until he felt he was all the way in contact. Artemis lifted his hips just a bit more, and Holly’s voice rose. He tried again brushing against her when fully hilted, and she shouted, her feet almost leaving the table.

When he returned again for a third time, Holly reached her limit. He felt her body seize against him, but she was coming in silence. Artemis let go of his speed and let his body take the furious pace it wanted, no longer aiming to go deep. His shallow strokes carried him over the edge as well. He had one last thrust left in him, and used it to drive deep, his head squashing within her. He groaned in relief as the first torrent of seed shot out of him.

His orgasm came in waves, his legs almost giving under the pleasure. He leaned over the table, supporting himself against it and pushing Holly forward.

“... Absolutely... brilliant,” he said, lacking the composure and breath for anything more.

Holly turned onto her back to look up at him. Their exertion had brought a deeper color into her cheeks, and her eyes shone dully with the embers of their pleasure. She was perfect. He bent low to kiss her in along her neck, when he realized that she wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were on Opal.

He had been trying to ignore their voyeur (and whatever effect her presence had on him) yet Holly actively focused on her. Had this all just been a performance in her mind? Had this even been an ‘intimate’ act for Holly?

Opal laughed, tossing back her head and reveling in her own villainy.

“When you first came here, your friendship was in crisis. Now you two can rut on command. It almost makes me wish I installed HoloVid recorders...”

Opal cocked her head to one side, feigning recollection.

“Wait, I already think I have. How much do you think this tape would go for on the black market, Holly? Mud fetishists are always hungry for more of this stuff.”

Holly sat up, shifting her thighs so they wouldn’t be in the sticky puddle dripping out from her onto the table. Opal’s attempts to rile her up were not meeting with success.

“You’d know the prices for Mud porn much better than I would, Opal” Holly said. “You might get off on the idea that it’s illegal, but there’s no law against it.”

Artemis supposed Holly would know, being an officer of the law, but he was less concerned about the legality of the recording. A three-dimensional recording with high fidelity was the worst kind of digital product that could be made of them. It could be reworked and edited in any number of ways.

“If I change the faces and voices just a little bit, I can release it. Or maybe I’ll keep Holly’s face on and start a little sex scandal for your early career.”

When Holly seemed content to ignore her, Opal changed her strategy.

“In any case, because it’s getting quite late and Arty here has proved he can use that bed, I think it’s time to follow up on my promises.”

Opal went to stand by the mirror wall, the exit door opening for her presence.

She snapped her fingers. “Come now, Arty. I’ll give you a bed. Do you mind sharing with me?”

Artemis’ anxiety returned. His heart rate increased. The overhanging lights became suddenly glaring. Tremors began again. He glanced at his fingertips in disbelief and saw them shaking. Is this my hex compelling obeisance? Or is it my body, overwhelmed by despair?

“Stay right on that table, Holly,” Opal warned. “This invitation is only for Arty.”

Artemis looked away. “That will not be necessary.”

Opal took away the illusion of choice by pointing to his chest. The first stirrings of hex-pain began at his heart. She beckoned him closer with her other hand.

Artemis looked to Holly. Her face was set with determination. Did she have a plan?

“It’s fine, Arty,” she said, quiet enough that Opal would not hear them. 

“You’ll be okay. I promise.”  
Artemis gave in.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: NonCon (see end notes if you need to know what acts are involved)

“Trust me”

Holly’s words gave Artemis the resolve he needed to save himself. There was a deeply bitter irony in his act because it made him feel as if he had ended his resistance, when the truth was that each act of resistance had been pointless from the very moment he landed in Opal’s lab. All of his ability to escape lay with Holly from then on; his fate was undoubtedly in her hands. She looked at him with a grim determination that was not restricted in any way by her nudity.

Opal took him by the arm, cold fingers closing around his wrist. Artemis had one last look at Holly before he was dragged up the stairs. Even though the floors could be mistaken for stone, Artemis instantly noticed that it was actually just compressed dust-- it lacked the natural formations that would be present in rock.

He took note of his surroundings. A mine of some sort, judging by the human-level technology that lay abandoned. Opal’s shuttle had relied on a separate access tunnel to reach this depth, and her construction drones had continued refining the space to be more habitable. He could see DNA cannons and the domes of 360-degree monitoring devices mounted across the ceiling in intervals. The secondary defenses were actually quite heavy.

It did not surprise him to find that Opal lived just above the cell that he and Holly had spent all their time in. A locked door lifted up to permit their entry into a room. Every piece of furniture within it was wine-dark like burgundy. _Or blood._

A spacious bed lay at the center of it, clothed in luxurious sheets and a neatly folded duvet. Opal hovered above him with her powers, her excitement only reinforcing his sense of despair in the red room.

She commanded him to lie on the sheets, tossing the duvet to the floor. His wrists were restrained using some kind of manacle that cushioned his wrists despite completely preventing their movement. Opal hooked it to a shackle at the top of her bed’s baseboard.

“This isn’t even for my safety,” she said once his hands were secured above his head. “Only because I find it immensely gratifying.”

Artemis was exposed to her in that position, his hands forced above his head increasing the sense of vulnerability. Her leering face completed the threatening image.

“Maybe I should tie your feet, too,” she said. “Oh well. Maybe next time.”

Artemis did not want what was about to happen. His very soul seemed to rebel against the thought of Opal Koboi becoming intimate with him. His inability to express his revulsion was almost too frustrating for him to live with. Opal picked up on it, lowering herself onto the bed so that she could stand by his head and stare down into his eyes.

“You really did forget, didn’t you? You thought you could spend all your time working on that project and it would give you some way out of this. You forgot who I am and what I do.”

She pulled her robe off of herself and hung it on the bedstead. Compared to Holly, she seemed scrawny and soft. One hand toyed with a thin breast and the other dipped between her legs. The situation obviously aroused her.

“I’m going to use you, Artemis,” she said, her voice’s sweet tones only sickening him. “I can’t believe my other self never thought of this. She was always in a rush to kill you. How wasteful.”

She stood over his head, displaying her slit to him. It was adorned only by a single vertical strip of hair that had no doubt been carefully shaven.

“What do you think of it, Mud Boy? It’s not some gaping, slobbering elfin hole. Don’t you prefer it this way?”

In truth, Artemis hated it. Even if Opal was not displaying an instrument of violence against him, he refused to see aesthetic value in the pixie. He believed intellectual attraction drove his physical tastes. It was impossible that sexual ideation could exist for an enemy like her.

She kneeled, positioning her pelvis directly over his face. There was a moment of pause before she settled downwards, and the spiced aroma of her grew oppressively strong. It was no perfume, but her natural smell. The only sign of arousal Artemis saw from his point of view was minor swelling around her opening and a flushed tone to her sickly pale skin.

She used her thumb to press his chin downward and sat on his open mouth. Opal’s thighs pressed around Artemis’ face, holding him steady.

“Lick me,” she commanded, and his tongue responded by beginning to flick up and down her thin opening.

Opal giggled in response, her hands seizing his hair to gain more control. As she leaned forward, his breathing was almost completely cut off under the press of smooth skin. He had to breathe entirely through his nose, her scent aggressively rolling through. She had been masturbating while watching him and Holly, so it did not take long for Artemis to begin to taste her as well.

The primary element he could perceive was the stickiness. A numbing taste of heat followed it, clinging to his tongue and beginning to coat his cheeks. It resembled the effect of certain peppercorns, but the numbness on his tongue did not erase his own perception of the act.

As if she sensed his discomfort, Opal hefted herself further onto his face, her mons pubis blocking his nostrils. Artemis had a spasm of fear in which he believed he was going to be killed by suffocation, but then Opal began to rock forcefully forward and back. He was forced to breathe in line with her tempo, as she dragged thin labia down to his chin and back up, leaving a sticky trail that oozed into his beard.

Opal began to pant, perhaps from exertion or perhaps because of the frenzy she had entered. Her eyes had a dangerous cast to them, as if anything could develop from them now.

Crazed, she tightened her grasp on the top of his head. “This is what you get, Arty. This is your prize.”

Then, before Artemis could really perceive what was happening, Opal reached an orgasm. Her back arched upwards and she supported herself on feet and hands as the energy ripped through her. Fluid gushed out from her, spraying his face.

It was only his face that was sullied, and yet it felt like the inside of his head had also been immersed in Koboi’s glutinous juices. His thoughts moved slowly and his ability to distance himself from his body had likewise been hindered.

Koboi brought her two hands together to clap him on his cheeks, hard enough to make them sting. She played with his face and everything she had left upon it, rubbing it all in like some depraved skin treatment. Her fingers pinched him, patted him, scratched him. She even pulled on his nasal septum with a thumb and index finger. The message was clear.

“Just a little Mud Toy,” she said in a mocking voice made lower in the aftermath of her orgasm. “You will do anything I want you to do.”

Then, in an especially disturbing move, she began to brush his dampened hair away from his face and behind his head. It was the exact same way his mother would have done it.

“If you ask me, Holly has the strongest claim to your possession. Your actions brought her into my grasp and it is only fair that she has you most of the time. But a matchmaker like me needs a little taste, too. You both are staying rent-free, after all.”

She climbed over her sheets to kneel by Artemis’ member. Long fingers grasped him again. He could remember her actions when they first arrived in confinement, when she had stimulated him to climax over Holly’s face. Just as before, his penis became erect as Opal kept up her stimulation. Reality had somehow delaminated for Artemis. He could scarcely put together his sensations with his perception. Had he secretly always seen sexual value in Opal?

“Here, I’ll suck on it for you,” she said. “Mommy will make it better.”

Opal opened her mouth and stuck her tongue out. It was quite long, extending below her chin. She let saliva pool up in her mouth and run down its length, dripping directly onto his urethra. As her hand jerked up and down his shaft and his meatus opened and closed, her smile grew wider.

“It’s like your cock is drinking it up. What a thirsty little thing.”

Just like her vaginal fluids, Opal’s saliva had a strange anesthetizing effect. His skin tingled as Opal spread it along him. She made a little sound with every stroke, expressions somewhere between exhalations and moans. Compared to the first time she had used him, it seemed that she was much less in control of herself.

“I’m going to gobble this up,” she said, voice wavering with excitement. Her mouth opened wide and she began to bring her head down.

Her breath was warm and moist along his length. Artemis could not avert his gaze as he became engulfed in her mouth. The feeling was unlike anything he had experienced before. For one, the sense of pressure and the clashing textures within her oral cavity overwhelmed him.

Opal looked at him from further down the bed, shaft still deep into her mouth. She was gloating inside, he could tell, even though she was performing oral sex on him. Her head descended even further, until her lips were pressed against his base. Opal completely surrounded him, and he thought that he could feel his tip reaching past her hard palate and touching the top of her throat. The realization was electrifying, but not in any positive way. At any moment, Opal could just as easily give pain or pleasure to him. Indeed, he felt her teeth down by his base.

Whatever her reasons, Opal did not bite down. Instead, she began to suck, keeping her head still but contorting her mouth and creating a vacuum that pressed her tissues against his. Once again, he was reminded of Opal’s essential adhesiveness-- he could feel the thickness of the spit in her mouth, and it seemed to cement her mouth firmly to his skin. The heat was unbearable to him, even before her tongue started to move around him. He writhed as the feeling shook him, but Opal kept her balance on his legs. She sucked intermittently, her head remaining still while her mouth worked to stimulate him.

There was nothing frantic about it. She moved with a slow, lizard-like patience. Even now, she moved her mouth with an exultant confidence, her gaze daring him to climax as unknown pleasure crawled its way up his body.

The feeling built beyond his capacity to suppress. Artemis gasped, helpless, as an orgasm came to him. He felt his prostate contract again and again, as more of his seed was pumped out of him. Opal’s throat moved, and her mouth continued to suck, insistent on his sensitive member as it began to go limp. His gasp became a groan. Opal laughed at him, the vibrations translated into him by the soft press of her teeth.

Once she finally had sucked it all out, she let his member loose, letting the last mouthful of seed spill out over her tongue and onto his cock. She wiped the corners of her mouth clean with the back of her hand.

“If this was a perfect world, that whole mess I swallowed would have contained some magic,” Opal said.

She stood up on the firm surface of the mattress, and used one foot to play with his testicles.

“That doesn’t matter much now that you’re my magical piggy bank. With added benefits, of course.”

She planted her foot on his lower abdomen. The weight was not excessive, but he felt the pressure when it came from the minimal surface area of pixie dimensions. The force only increased as she put more weight on it.

“It might be time for the main course,” Opal said. “What do you think?”

“I think not.”

The voice hadn’t come from Artemis. He looked for the source, and found it swinging out of a vent above them.

“Impossible,” Opal said, shocked.

Holly launched herself directly at her captor, flying kick aimed directly at Opal’s large head. Artemis was compelled by his hex to intervene, but his hands were bound above and behind him. It was a lucky break for Holly, whose kick sent Opal tumbling backwards off of the bed.

“You escaped?” Artemis asked. “Allow me to guess- you used water to dissolve all of this compressed dirt and tunnel your way out.”

Holly grinned. “More like compressed dust. Opal didn’t do her homework before digging our pit. I’ve been working on a tunnel for as long as we’ve had running water. Sorry that you’re only finding about it now.”

Artemis shook his head. “I am still under magical control. If you advance any further from the foot of the bed, I might even kick you.”

Holly surveyed him from toe to head, no doubt seeing the sticky remains of what Opal had done to him.

“Are you hurt? Is anything broken?”

“Nothing that can’t be mended,” Artemis said. In truth, he didn’t know how affected he might be.

“Good,” Holly said, and then jumped over him to deliver a precise knuckle-strike between his eyes.

The blow knocked him out. He hoped he would wake up as a liberated human, even if he could never regain his future.

Instead, he woke to the same burgundy-colored hell of Opal’s room. His captor had not been deposed. Instead, she bore an ugly bruise on her forehead, and lightning passed between her fingers. Holly was pinned to the bed in front of Artemis’ feet, limbs fighting against a stasis field.

Opal winced as she touched her bruise. “You both are lucky I shielded myself in time. If this hurt any worse, I don’t think Holly would be alive right now.”

Artemis was shocked. He had allowed Opal to escape his mind as soon as he saw the kick. It had been an injection of hope.

“Well, I’ve had enough of letting the elf run free. She’s earned herself a brand of her own.”

Artemis felt his handcuffs turn to dust as Opal waved her fingers at them. Then she pointed at Holly.

“Fuck her, Mud Boy. And don’t be showy about it this time.”

The command clashed with his desire to protect Holly, but it was an impossible struggle. He did not even have any magic to paralyze himself with. His body approached Holly on hands and knees while she searched its eyes for the soul within.

“Please,” he protested, voice soft. Opal only scoffed in response.

“Arty, it’s okay,” Holly said, and Artemis could see the tears of pity she held for him.

A sex act started, mechanical and without any passion. The only love within it came from the care they still held for one another. Opal became dissatisfied.

“Pick up the pace, Mud Boy. I’ve got places to be.”

Artemis body, ever dutiful, went faster. The mechanical act was enough to build towards climax.

Opal picked that time to strike. She took his hand and placed it low on Holly’s stomach. His fingers pointed left. Opal then placed his other hand over it but facing the other direction so that it looked as if fingers sprouted out of one palm, like wings.

Then she ordered him to come. Artemis heard her whisper something, but the words could not be distinguished. A red light glowed from underneath his hands. He could feel Holly’s womb moving below his hands. Artemis shuddered to think what could be happening.

Opal finally let Artemis pull himself off of and out of Holly. He saw what his hands had been used for, and nearly fainted. The ‘wings’ of his hands had created a mark. It was like the rune that controlled him but centered on her lower abdomen.

“It came out quite well,” Opal said. “You really would make a good warlock, if I didn’t keep sucking you dry.”

Holly was also released from her stasis. She touched the mark with panic in her eyes as she scanned the runes that spiraled within.

“D’Arvit,” she said. “This is bad.”

“This is a Class Three Magic Restraint, known commonly as a Lust Hex.” Opal laughed again as Holly realized what had just happened.

“That’s right. That thirsty elfish cunny of yours is drawn to Arty, and Arty has to obey me. Did you think I was going to let you off just because your escape failed?”

Opal snapped, and Holly bent forward, her face pressing into the bed as she held her stomach. Moans escaped her mouth and Artemis moved over to assist her, believing that her mark of pain had become too intense.

“Stop this!” Artemis shouted to Opal. He never got the chance to hear a reply.

That was because Holly grabbed his arm and clung to it. When he turned to look at her, her face was flushed in the way it only got when they were in the heat of passion.

“Arty...” she said, her voice almost whining. Her hand was already stroking his member.

He sat back, surprised, and Holly took the opportunity to stand and grind herself against his knee. The amount of moisture that emerged from her was unprecedented. It was enough to flow down his leg in rivulets.

“Arty, _help,_ ” Holly said, a mesmer escaping into her last word. He deflected the spell and looked up at Opal, afraid that Holly’s use of magic could lead to more retribution.

“Magic flows from you to her through the hex now,” Opal said. “Now that the same rules bind you both, she’ll be a reserve pool of energy for me.”

Holly grabbed the hair at the back of his head and forced him to make eye contact again.

“ _Help me, Arty,_ ” she commanded again, in the mesmer.

“Don’t blame her,” Opal said. “When I flip her switch, her desire for you increases by several orders of magnitude.”

Artemis tried to set Holly aside but she held onto his leg with all limbs. Instead of pain, Opal had decided to inflict Holly with lust. It was the more effective motivator, of the two. An aversion to pain could corral someone into taking an action, but lust was unrivaled at pulling someone in.

The developing wrestling match was spectated with some interest by Opal, but it was not enough to keep her entertained.

“You’re not being very generous, Arty,” she said.

“I have no need for your idea of... generosity,” Artemis said, prying one arm off of his leg before Holly moved it behind his head.

“Allow me to provide a small remedy,” Opal said.

She controlled Holly’s finger and dragged across his abdomen, adding a painless mark below Artemis’ control hex. The circle now had a line extending out of its lowest side, one that went directly down his middle, all the way to the base of his penis.

He looked down at himself and realized that Opal had just altered his hex of pain to contain a lust mark connected to Holly. He felt his desire being stimulated, not from his penis but from all of the organs within him that fed his reproductive system. His vesicles, prostate, epididymis, even testes seemed to roil with invisible energy and demand the satisfaction that could only come from ejaculation. He regretted all of his study of anatomy. He had a name for every single part of this infernal machine.

In his vague haze, he could detect Opal leaving, but he focused his attention on Holly. He pulled himself out of her headlock and looked into her eyes. He knew that the crazed, starved look she directed at him was actually his own.

This time, he could not refuse when Holly pressed his back down onto the bed with just one palm. Even if his desire was being compelled, it was not out of line with his general spirit. His ability to be critical was fully repressed when Holly climbed over him and his rigid length met her wet depths. Their speed was insufficient for her and so she changed positions to face the other way, letting her hips carry the movement from top to bottom, voicing her satisfaction in loud growls that sparked an animal-like instinct in him.

He took hold of her hips, tightening his grip until they were secured. Her movements were then amplified with his own assistance. It took very little to make them orgasm. Artemis shot off early, but was still driven to help Holly rub herself off, inching his softening member up and down, even as the pleasure made his head swim. Holly spoke words of love in Gnommish, kissing his knee in thanks for his efforts.

Strangely, there was not much of a refractory period. They reached for each other again, eager to plunge into their shared compulsion. Holly got onto her knees and hands, facing her enticing rear in his direction, daring him to act first.

The size mismatch problem revealed itself. Artemis could conceivably find a way to line himself up with Holly when they were both low to the bed, but his impatience suggested a simpler solution. He eased Holly’s legs out from under her, drawing her down flat across the mattress. At first confused, Holly’s smile grew when she saw what Artemis was going for. She was prone, but their height difference was negligible there.

He used his arms (and weeks of push-ups forced on him by his partner) to hold himself over her, while he could thrust down and in. He could look below himself and see it all. Holly, jaw set with accelerated pleasure, her body drawn in strong lines all the way to the curve of her hips, where he was coming in with such momentum that their bodies rippled as they met. With a perverse fascination, Artemis realized that all of the care from earlier had disappeared-- his entire length disappeared into Holly, fully making contact deep within. She loved it.

Whatever Opal had done to them had removed the normal logical boundaries of their bodies. It was possible that the spell cast on them had altered what would otherwise have been a sensitive organ into a fully erogenous one. It did not matter why it had happened; Knowing that reaching that depth within Holly produced wonderful sounds from her was enough of a reason for him.

He came right up against that opening, feeling his entire seminal apparatus rejoice as it pumped more and more seed into Holly. He was lucky to feel her orgasm in turn, her feet moving involuntarily under his legs as her walls milked him and she let out a long sigh. She liked to come quietly.

Despite how exhausting it was, they had no time to rest. They were bound by a curse that pressured them together, spiraling and coiling with sex until it seemed that Artemis could not determine the boundaries of himself. And still they went deeper in together.

Opal returned hours later to find them still going at it. Artemis and Holly were nothing but shuddering forms who were coated in layers of their own fluids, having already ruined her sheets. They did not even take notice of her, occupied with slow-fucking their way to orgiastic joy. Even after Opal made the enchantment go dormant, they kept rutting until they had one last anemic climax together, passing out in each other’s arms out of exhaustion.

“Disgusting,” Opal said under her breath. She had intended for it to be a punishment for Holly’s attack, but it only had put her mattress in peril.

Holly had escaped by using water from the shower to trickle through a tile that had been pried up by just a centimeter. She had kept at it for days, letting the water dig its own channel into the compressed dirt. It had been dumped and compressed by earlier Mud Men miners, and Opal had thought it to be rock. No one in Haven would have given it a second thought, except for a dwarf.

Holly had waited specifically for the moment her captor would be distracted and she could tunnel her way out. Instead of stealing the shuttle and escaping, she had attempted to retrieve Artemis.

Holly lay atop her boy now, limp like a wet, dirty rag. With the Lust Hex on her, she could easily be placed under control. Future escape attempts would be impossible. Opal transferred the two of them into their own room, tossing the tangle of their dozing bodies onto the bed they had earned.

 _Night night,_ Opal thought, then shut off the light. She wouldn’t be back for a very long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning : NonCon (Restraints, Partial Mind Control, Subject in Distress, Forced Facesitting, Forced Oral, Forced Sex Between Holly and Artemis)


	17. Chapter 17

Despite gaining a bed, clothes, and a period of leniency from Opal, the situation had not really improved for Holly. After the few days it took to recover from the sex marathon, she realized that she had said some regrettable things while their hexes were activated. She brought the subject up late one day. Artemis had been toying with a puzzle-box, more or less resigned to his fate, and she was toweling herself dry after a visit to the shower (now thoroughly secured against escape attempts).

“I said some pretty weird things back then, didn’t I?”

Artemis looked up. “Did you say something? I’m sorry, I was focusing.”

“I said I loved you when I was under the lust hex. I wanted to apologize.”

“Apologize? For what?” Artemis let go of the puzzle. “That might have been one of the only positive things to come of that whole debacle. You... want to take it back?”

Holly looked at the floor. She had known this would be difficult. He was so much younger and was a human. She had been taught that Mud People were possessive, the males especially.

“You need to explain this to me, Holly,” Artemis said. “The things I feel for you go beyond simple companionship. I had thought you felt the same way.”

The last thing Holly needed right then was a fight. But she also couldn’t let her partner believe that he had something from her that she had never given anyone else. They had not even made it past 10 years of knowing each other, let alone the 20 years of dating it would take for them to be ‘an item’.

“You’re very important to me,” Holly said. “It’s different than love. Maybe even better.”

Artemis made a sound like a retch. “Better?” His fist hit the table.

Holy jumped back, reaching for a Neutrino that would never be at her hip again. She had never seen Artemis act with violence. He did see her reach for her gun.

Holly had no way of knowing everything that was happening inside of Artemis. He may have had the intellect to keep himself in control after the things Opal had done to his body, but there was no way that his subconscious could have forgotten the violation. It was a kind of instability he had never known, just like the desire he felt towards Holly came from a part of himself he could not understand.

“I struggle to understand this,” Artemis says. “Why? After what we’ve done together in this very room? Even though we sleep in the same bed?”

“Maybe love means something else in your language,” Holly said, now trying to de-escalate.

“Don’t insult my intelligence, please Holly. I love you. That means I want to spend the rest of my days with you. I want to cherish you. I want to be close with you.”

That’s what love meant for Holly, too. But love was not something she knew how to give. When she had spoken words of love to Artemis, she had been in the middle of brain-melting pleasure, her insides twisting with magic. It could not have been the truth. She couldn’t let Artemis walk away with the wrong impression.

“What did it mean to you?” he asked.

What could she say? It had felt good, it had comforted her, but they had only spent weeks together. That wasn’t love. It was coping.

Holly had never told him otherwise. She had expected him to be able to intuit the boundaries of their relationship, but it was an obvious mistake now.

“Obviously, I am being used by every fairy around me.” Artemis said. “I don’t think I can stand to be near you.”

“Hold on, Arty,” Holly said. “It doesn’t have to be love to be special. We share it together, that’s why it’s important.”

“It was special.” His head hit the table. “For me.”

There wasn’t much she could say. All of her previous romantic partners had been elves; they had known the rules of the game. Artemis should have been able to get the hint.

Opal chose the lack of the discussion to make her introduction.

“If you want to be apart, I can facilitate that,” she said. “I’ll be your fairy godmother.”

Her robots descended on the room and started to create a thin wall in the middle. Artemis did nothing to stop the process. Holly was held in place by magic as the barrier came up. They were left with a door that opened up onto a corridor. they would have access to the bathroom through the corridor but otherwise were locked in their own areas.

It was just like Opal to take advantage of their instability and force themselves apart. She was jealous. Holly knew that.

“Any time you want to come together again, let me know,” Opal said. “All you have to do is say ‘I surrender’.”

There was no way Holly could see that happening unless Opal used her magic to force them into submission. She and Artemis were capable of surviving on their own. They didn’t need to be with each other. Maybe what Artemis needed was some alone time to organize his thoughts and find ways to self-regulate.

While that happened, Holly could also deal with her own problems. She needed to find a new method to escape.

At the simple thought of escape, she had a sudden surge of need within her. It was so intense that it was almost like a cramp. She felt the imprint of Artemis’ hands warm over her belly. It was like the scene in Opal’s boudoir all over again. She could remember the nightmarish condition they had been worked into, where no amount of fucking could overcome how horny they were, their bodies answering to an external call. She had been sore for a day afterward, but part of her had liked that feeling of losing absolute control.

Her pussy twitched, a reminder that she was still being influenced by the spell. Artemis had the same exact restrictions but was punished with pain. There was nothing to do about pain, but she wondered if she could do something about her lust.

But even as she fingered herself, she felt the heat grow higher and higher. No matter how fast she went or how degrading her mental fantasies got, there was no actual response beyond an ever-winding spring of pleasure that would never pop. After at least half an hour of attempted treatment, she had to give up, her right hand sore, her body covered in sweat. She had one last idea, the classic home remedy for young elfin lust: a cold shower.

She twisted the handle on her door and it opened outward, taking her stumbling along with it into the corridor. Her feet took her through the underlit gloom to the bathroom. Her simple clothing was torn off of her, the underwear sticking to her a little too much and getting thrown off to the side.

Thankfully, the addition of cold water put an end to the arcane arousal she had felt, but it allowed her exhaustion to come to the surface. She gathered up her clothes and shuffled to bed, grateful for the grasp of memory foam after the floor’s unyielding surface. Holly couldn’t even think of resisting Opal anymore. She wasn’t sure she would ever accept that. Despite her reservations, her body enjoyed the luxuries of bed enough to get her to sleep.

She woke up in the dimmed lights that Opal used to suggest ‘bedtime’. Holly’s dreams had been indecipherable but all seemed to be a variation of her chasing someone or being chased herself. She preferred to take an intermission from that, and hope her subconscious had something better to offer when she got back.

Walking to the bathroom again, she realized that she didn’t have her underwear when a light breeze seemed to tickle her between the legs. She found a neatly folded pair of men’s underwear next to the sink instead of her own pair. She sniffed it to tell if it was used (a trick she had learned from her father) and found her nose filled with the musk of Artemis. It wasn’t really dirty, but just one sniff had brought to mind the animalistic smell of Artemis-- sharp but warm.

Once she realized she was sniffing someone else’s used underwear, she quickly tucked it under one arm. If Artemis had done something with her knickers, she wasn’t going to let him come back for his own trunks. _Let Opal try to keep up her silent act over this mixup._

Holly’s plan to stay abreast of the Underwear Wars had a single stumbling block: it was quite cold in the cells now. Once she had enough, she got up from the bed and knocked on the wall.

“Artemis, you stupid boy, I needed those!”

She stood around feeling stupid until Artemis answered with a series of knocks. They went on and on, in a fixed pattern. It was not Morse code or any code that she knew.

“You might think it’s very engaging to develop the world’s first language communicated entirely through walls,” Holly said. “But I’m freezing my ass off because of the robes Opal gave us.”

Artemis kept knocking until Holly finally kicked the wall.

“D’Arvit! That’s it, then. Your shorts are mine, no take-backs. Enjoy the ice-cock, you... bandit.”

She pulled on his underwear and found the elastic band only fit when she has them pulled up high. Her reflection in the mirror-wall was not flattering.

“Gods, I look like my grandpap,” Holly said. The shorts had to ride up very high, so that the seam dug into her pussylips. That admittedly did not look like her grandpap.

While Artemis had been working on the golden torc for Opal, Holly had been planning an escape. Now that escape was not an option, she was actually bored. There was no more mission. No objective to achieve. It was just her and Opal and Artemis for all time. Things would be beyond her control, but she prayed to all the gods, goddesses, and deities she knew that it wouldn’t be like this forever.

When the lights came back up, she got out of bed, sleepless. Her morning stretches and basic calisthenics went off as easy as ever, but she found worries at the back of her head. _Is Artemis keeping up with his exercises? Has he got anything to eat yet? Did he get a bed too?_

Holly reprimanded herself for the thoughts. There was nothing she could do to help him right now. He obviously needed to recuperate, and had even asked to be separated from her. She just couldn’t let go of the worrying. She chalked it up to her protective instincts as a LEP officer and friend.

When she headed to the shower, she found a surprise waiting for her next to the sink. Her underwear had returned, with substantial additions. It was covered with loads of spunk. She reached out a finger to touch it and found that the ribbons of semen had not yet dried. She saw strands stick to her finger as she lifted it, stretching for quite a bit before breaking.

Normally, people do not like to find their clothing items covered in the sexual fluids of someone else. In fact, Holly had broken at least one nose and sprained a few wrists defending her clothing from being preyed upon during her time in the Academy. Her privacy was something that she protected, and she ignored the thieves rationale that ‘everyone knows elves like to mark their territory’.

Elves had a few more scent glands than other fairy families. That _did not_ mean they were trying to attract mates or some other toadshit fairy-psych theory. It really only meant that Holly got snide comments from she-fairies when she didn’t apply enough deodorant, or else had to literally fight off hordes of would-be panty-raiders when she left used clothes in her locker. Somebody stealing her clothes and immersing themselves in her smell was the outcome she had given everything to avoid.

_So why was seeing her panties covered in cum turning her on so much?_

She could imagine Artemis in bed, clutching the knickers to his face, closing his eyes in low-lidded ecstasy as his fist pumped at his cock. Just as he came, he moved her panties to his cockhead, moaning her name into the mattress as more and more hot, sticky come shot out.

Holly woke with a start and realized that she had been daydreaming at the sink. When she looked in the mirror, she saw a face she had not seen often-- her own, but flushed to its ear tips, her eyes glossy with lust and a trickle of drool coming from her mouth. To make it worse, her pussy had responded to the waking dream, responding too eagerly to the mental image. She stepped back to see the imprint of his hands on her body in the form of the lust hex. A Mud Man had marked her, even though he was less than a quarter of her age. She had become the pervert-elf stereotype in full, just an eager slut for Mud Cock.

Holly knew the thoughts were really just an extension of her earlier sexual fantasy. But the thoughts felt real, and it was the combination of despair and gut-clenching lust that make her snap. She stripped Artemis’ trunks off of herself and looks at the come-splattered underwear.

_Why not wear them. He did this for you, you know. He had your pussy-scent in mind as he saturated this with his come._

Her hands reach for the knickers.

_He was a genius among his people, and now he masturbates all over your underclothes like a degenerate pervert. You did that to him. You made him crave that dripping honeypot between your legs. You can’t wait for that Mud Boy to ravish it again, huh?_

She holds the limp garment and breathes in the tell-tale smell of come.

_You like that, don’t you, you fucking knife-eared slut?_

The words she taunted herself with ringed across her brain, making her spine tingle with the aftershock. She barely could bend her leg to put the knickers on. She felt the warm squish on her thigh even before the other side was on. She pulled the garment onto herself, moving ever-so-slowly, feeling the texture between her legs become as wet and slimy as if she were in the middle of fucking.

When it fit snugly against her pussy, she had a near-sacrilegious thought.

_Captain Holly Short of the Lower Elements Police, reporting for duty._

She saluted, wearing nothing but her soiled knickers. It was such a twisted act of self-deception that she almost lost her arousal entirely. But following just behind the disappointment was a wave of sex.

She felt her mons through cummy fabric, and she thrummed with a pleasure more intense than ever before. She had never embraced her shameful desires so wholeheartedly. It felt like she was going crazy, it felt dangerous, it felt like she was grieving for the Holly Short she knew. But mostly, it felt very, very good. She used her flexibility to put a foot up on the sink and rubbed herself some more. Her hand lifted one of her breasts just to let it drop. The pointed tip bounced and swung around.

_You torpedo-titted little elf. If you can’t even resist yourself, how was Arty ever going to stand a chance?_

She let up on the stimulation, enjoying the feeling of being all wound up.

_Now that there’s no chance of escape, the very first thing you choose to do is finger yourself. Imagine if the people who doubted you saw you now? You really are the whore they always accused you of being. Lili Frond with a gun and a Mud Pet. Actually, you don’t even have the gun. A fucking pixie bested you and now you’re going crazy for Mud Cock._

Holly was using the mirror to amplify the effect. She really could see herself going sex-crazy. Her pupils had dilated like she was on tunnelshrooms and her drool from earlier was now incredible in its volume. Her pussy’s new wetness was cutting through Artemis’ work. She threw open the door and stepped into the hall, hoping to find her man there. Of course he wasn’t. His door was locked.

In her room, the throb of her sex had her going mad. She couldn’t find an orgasm, even with all the stimulation she tried. It was impossible to keep up the barrage of internal degradation. The frustration built up until she could take it no longer and threw herself at the wall.

“Arty! Get over here!” she yelled. Some knocking started afterward, but she ignored its pattern and just responded with her own pounding.

“Fuck me! Please!”

She used both hands to slap the wall, and her palms stayed planted against it. It was thin enough for her to hear vibrations like words on the other side. When she pressed her ear to the wall, she couldn’t make out anything that was said. It was a thin divider, so it didn’t make sense. Further complicating things was when she felt the definite pressure and heat of a hand opposite hers. It was Artemis’ hand, she could tell by the size of its print.

Acting on instinct, she lowered her hands, and his followed it downwards. She stuck her tongue against the handprint, and felt his hand react on the other side. It was as if it was the wall only communicated pressure and heat. Artemis picked up the trick easily, and soon Holly felt her tongue on the wall joined by his own.

Something about the surface could bend inwards and outwards, letting them register the slight press of their bodies. It was not like there was a sheet of plastic or something between them. But the wall had been designed to give Holly just enough to stay horny.

She pressed her whole torso against the wall, her breasts pressed in, the nipples fighting to remain stiff. Holly turned her feet outward and was able to press her mons and thighs into the wall too. Artemis outlined the presence of everything by doing a once-over with his hands, but then kept his fingers limited solely to trailing her thigh.

“You fucking _tease_!” Holly pulled back her legs. She was not very sensitive when it came to her tits (probably because of a career full of keeping them locked and compressed for long periods), but something about the moment made her in the mood for it. Artemis kept up his teasing, one finger drawing circles around the tips of her breast. She was seconds away from walking away from the wall entirely with impatience.

Then she noticed the heat radiating onto her legs. She reached a hand down and found something that could only be Artemis’ dick. It was erect and pushed against the wall. She decided to return his favor by running her own finger up and down the sensitive underside. She laughed when he pulled it off the wall in obvious anger.

“Now that you know what that feels like, how about we move on to the real attraction,” Holly muttered.

She turned around so that her rear faced the wall and then backed up into it. She spread her cheeks so that her pussy could get closer to direct contact and waited for him to respond. First, she felt his tongue, but something was wrong. His tongue wasn’t wet. Then she felt a finger, but it could not really be felt as deeply as she needed. The pressure and heat was there, but without depth and texture and all the other things that made his body, there didn’t feel like a point.

Holly almost cried. At this point, she’d spent entire minutes full of desire. Without relief, she might actually go crazy, and not just in a sexual way. She had desecrated a lot of her personal mental touchstones to get this horned up. If she walked away from this without an orgasm, the guilt would fry her brain.

Artemis must have felt the same way. She could feel his cockhead as it tried to push in, translated into mere millimeters by the wall. There was no sense of texture. She threw her hips backwards, leaving wet trails on the wall, trying to find relief. Finally she remembered what Opal had told them. _To get what I want, I just have to say ‘I surrender’._

After the turmoil of the day, it was an easy decision for Holly. She had all of her reasons to fight taken away from herself.

“I surrender!” Holly yelled. Strangely, she heard her call echoed from behind her.

Over her shoulder she saw that the wall was entirely gone, vanished in a snap. Artemis was there, nude, and very, very close to entering her. His knees were bent to give him the right angle, but their bodies had been frozen with the removal of the wall.

Opal followed soon after. She had a syringe in her hand, with a long and thin needle, but not a single other thing accompanied her. She was nude, in the softbodied style that Holly could imagine seeing in old Mud Man paintings. Not the hard-edged or curvy beauties of the modern age. The thought only arose because Opal looked more serene than ever before.

“I didn’t need your permission to do this,” she said. “But it makes me very happy to see you both give in. Not that there ever was a question. I told you in the beginning, Poppy.”

“Lemme fuck,” Holly said. “We can talk later.”

She could not even approximate animosity while riding the bubble of arousal that had inflated in her. Opal smiled gently.

“Allow me to get in position.”

The pixie hovered above the floor below Holly, looking up at her belly while her legs passed under the couple, frozen at the cusp of coitus. It took a few more moments while Opal stared intently at Holly’s lower abdomen.

Curiosity overwhelmed her. “What are you looking at? Just let us free already.”

Opal let Holly in on her magically-enhanced vision. A little circular projection appeared in front of Holly and Artemis. It looked disturbingly like certain anatomical diagrams, but with a vivid fleshlike appearance. Artemis could likely name all the organs, but Holly only needed to know one or two to deduce what was happening.

“Oh gods,” she said.

“Jesus, no.” Artemis was working out the purpose of the syringe. “She has 17 years left on her cycle, you cannot know the effects of undoing the lock.”

Opal rolled her eyes. “I’ve had researchers working on this around the clock. I know exactly what this will cause.”

Then she unfroze them, putting a little spark of magic into their lust circuit. Artemis sprung to his task with unabated enthusiasm. After sinking his length in Holly, he looked up at the projection to see where he was in Opal’s vision.

“You’re almost there, Mud Boy. Mommy fixed Holly’s entire cavity to be erogenous. Really send it in there next time, she’ll love it.”

He complied, using his first actual thrust to go hard and deep. He saw his cock collide deep within Holly in a way that undoubtedly would have hurt an unmodified person. Instead, the barrier moved like rubber and then clung on to him. It moved with its own sexual impulse now, just like her walls. His own organs had been altered too, but he could do nothing in the moment but exult at the sensation it gave him. Holly felt closer than ever to him. He gave himself to that feeling of unison.

“I love you, Holly,” he cried, thrusting again. His arms crossed her body, holding her in place against his hips.

The sounds she made could not be compared to anything that came before. If she had ever growled before, her voice was roaring. If she had ever moaned when Artemis got a nice angle, she was mewling now. Right in front of her face, Opal was projecting the bizarre internal view of the act. Holly felt herself being conditioned by it. When Artemis went deep, she could see it in the magic display. Every twitch and shudder within her was translated into sight. It was like a mirror looking directly into her pussy and beyond.

Opal was not hiding her own action beneath Holly. Her hand was sliding her middle finger into her slit with what seemed to be a slow unending movement, rolling in and then pulling out. Every time Holly looked down, she could see Opal staring up at her. It would have been unnerving if she were not receiving deep penetration in a thoroughly altered body.

Artemis’ hold on her was definitely assisting with depth. His cock entered upwards and was coaxed into an even steeper angle within her. The sensation overwhelmed her to the point that she did not even think to reach for her clit, which she almost always needed to orgasm. Each time his cock was buried inside and her walls tightened down on him, she felt like Neutrino shots were being fired at the base of her spine.

Artemis came first, pained breaths morphing into moans as he felt his entire seminal system firing off, squeezing out more and more seed into Holly. Her hexed womb carried the sensation of the splashing ropes so strongly that it felt as if sexual pleasure was blossoming against the surface of her brain. Opal took that moment to act.

She used the x-ray vision to help direct her needle through the skin and up into Holly’s womb. She had a syringe full of a special formula of magical herbs. One would rapidly age the user and the other would undo aging. When carefully combined, they would cancel each other out and leave living tissue unchanged-- it was only the reproductive time-lock that Opal would eliminate with the injection.

Holly watched Opal depress the plunger and felt the fluid filling her. Opal’s magic lens displayed what was happening on the microscopic level. Artemis’ sperm swam in their mindless swarm, approaching an egg that was covered in a shimmering shroud the color of snow. Before their eyes, the color faded into transparency and then the shroud turned into shreds and dissolved. By the time Holly realized what’s happening, it was too late to do anything but stare, hyperfocused, as fertilization occurred.

Opal stopped casting her projection and turned the syringe into dust, blowing it away.

“All done.”

If she had her way, she would have made her exit then and allowed Holly and Artemis to deal with what they had seen. Unfortunately for her, she did not realize that lust hexes were unnaturally powerful things. Additionally, when the compound she had injected into Holly had entered her bloodstream, it had created a massive illusion where Holly’s sensations were being amplified twice over in the nerves, once by the aging herb and once by the rejuvenation serum. The formula had even dripped into Artemis as well. The result was an unparalleled sexual frenzy.

The control mechanism of their hexes had no power over them anymore, but they were still not capable of escape. They were magnetized to each other, equipped with bodies that would not be tired of sex, and unable to perceive reality in any meaningful way. For them, it was all soft and hard, wet and wet. Artemis kept up his pre-orgasm pace with Holly so that she could get hers too. Her mind swam with the biological fact inside of her, but another part of her is drawn deeper into the fantasy.

_The little knife-ear hussy got exactly what she wanted. A belly full of Mud Seed. You’re going to have a hybrid with the boy that kidnapped you._

She came on Artemis’ next stroke, convulsing with the fire of her shame and her sex. He held her tight in his arms, withdrawing for the moment. She was low against him so he picked her up for a kiss. The compound made it seem as if they were kissing for an eon, worlds being created and destroyed each time their tongues shifted against each other.

Holly asked him to drop her and he obeyed out of love. She pinned Opal with her arms and knees and stuck her ass out.

“Fuck me while I’m on the pixie,” Holly said. It felt like a good idea at the time.

“No, you will not,” Opal said. “In fact, I think I’m going to put you both in time out for the next decade.”

Holly slapped Opal. “Shut up, you big-headed bitch.”

Opal sputtered. The last people to hit her had become involuntarily institutionalized. She could not understand why the control hex did not work.

Artemis certainly had some portion of his mind in good working order. This survival-oriented portion of his brain was able to give him several warnings about having sexual intercourse directly over a person who could conjure lightning bolts. Artemis ignored his intellect. There was something very satisfying about enjoying Holly while the architect of their pleasure and misery had to lay pinned beneath them. It would not eliminate her crimes against them, but it had symbolic worth.

He entered Holly from behind again, but this time there was no business with angles. He could move his hips in an even line and admire the spectacle of Holly’s plump lips as they invited him in, soft, smooth, and gripping him as he went to and fro. The feeling of her opening tightening across the base of his cock almost gave him a migraine, but the pressure eventually dissipated into a font of endorphins that seemed to originate in his lower brain and make his eyes roll upwards. It was only after a few moments that he realized that it had been his orgasm. To his relief, Holly had used her clitoris to catch up.

“Keep going, keep going,” she said, patting his arm.

He moved one hand to her shoulder and another to Opal’s shoulder. The fight had gone out of her within the first minute of their fucking. Now her eyes just watched the scene above her with no discernible emotion.

Holly and Artemis kept fucking until the formula wore off. Once their nerves were back in order, Holly rolled off of Opal and Artemis collapsed next to her. They were both aching everywhere, kept aloft only by magic.

Opal sat up, brushed herself off, and sped out of the room, looking down. There was no after-glow to enjoy after she left, despite the massive amount of sex that had just been had. Instead, the return to sobriety had them processing everything that happened.

Artemis began with what caused the separation. “On the subject of _us_ , I cannot deny that I love you.”

Holly wished desperately that they weren’t going to go straight into a fight.

Artemis turned his head so he could look Holly in the eye. “You might not ‘love’ me, but I will accept that. I should have recognized that a simple word has less significance compared to the complexities of our bond.”

Holly sighed in relief. “Thanks, Arty. I never wanted to hurt you. We’ve still got each other’s backs. And each other’s beds, when we feel like it. Give it a few years, and who knows what words I’ll describe _us_.”

Artemis shivered. “Years? After what we just did to Opal? I estimate we have hours, at most.”

Holly laughed bitterly, and held a hand over her stomach. “Not unless she wants to get rid of her favorite science experiment. If what we saw was true, we’ll have 3 years before she can even think of liquidation.”

They were quiet for a while, thinking of the possibility of new life among them. Then they got up to clean themselves and their home. There was a future ahead of them, and they weren’t going to waste it living in fear of Opal Koboi.

\--

The retaliation Artemis was waiting for never came. Once again, Holly and Artemis had stumbled into victory against Opal. The temporary breach of her hexes had damaged her self-esteem and she turned her plans outward while her prisoners continued developing. Their next eight years were lived in ultimate ease.

In Haven, Opal’s inventions defeated those of Foaly in most LEP trials (thanks to the workforce of Koboi Armaments). Captain Short got caught up in the Fowl Manor incident not too long afterward.

Opal used her technical expertise to provide vague assistance during the hostage crisis (mainly bothering Foaly), but her main involvement was preventing the troll incident inside the manor from getting _too_ out of hand. Cudgeon still ended up deposed by the Council, but Opal got her name seen as a key player in the incident.

Next, she set up the events of the Bwa Kell rebellion, keeping herself hidden behind the persona of an anonymous hacker that eventually faded away to make Cudgeon look even more unhinged. With a smaller-scale plan that didn’t involve destroying all LEP weapons, Koboi Armaments kept its legitimacy and Opal stayed out of the psych ward. Everyone else still got their role in ‘saving the day’. Opal was thanked by name by the Council, and even received a Key to the City after her quick thinking ‘restored’ the LEP’s weapons after they had been ‘hacked’. Her renown grew even larger.

Sure enough, the prisoners had produced a child. It would take about three years to gestate (the last year was when the signs would truly begin to show) but the happening had only unsettled them briefly. They accepted their future with surprising readiness. Opal was astounded that they could they just accept their child. It did not seem like a burden to them and did not change their biological stress levels.

The brilliant Dr. Ginash had improved the Natalics fertilization experiments to the point that it needed very small quantities of the exotic ingredients. Opal used data from her real-world trial to help her doctor determine what would actually be required for mass-production.

Her next opportunity to gain fame came when young Artemis lost his C-Cube to some Mud Man in the tech sector. Opal became recognized for her grace under fire when Haven went into lockdown. She provided a rich array of information to the Mud Boy on the surface by revealing her participation in the human black market, even sharing the surveillance technology she had installed in human tech. The young Artemis came to trust Opal for disclosing her own criminal enterprises, and thus revealed a secret of his own: he planned to escape the LEP mind wipe, using her assistance (with Mulch Diggums as a backup).

For the year or so it would take for the boy to become de-prioritized by the LEP, Opal turned her attention to her other target. After a few awkward phone calls, Captain Short’s loneliness won out and Opal began to meet with her often, just to talk. They became close friends, bonded through their experiences and assisted by Opal’s secret knowledge of Holly’s life.

To fill in the gaps in Captain Short’s hero career, Opal activated two sleeper agents of hers, gnomes who would be disguised as Pip and Kip from an old cartoon show. They held fabricated grievances against the Council and instead of launching their attack against Julius Root, they started with the assassination of a Council member. In response, Opal chose that moment to restore the memories of boy Artemis to assist the LEP. Following clues that she had left behind, Artemis was able to predict where Pip and Kip would strike next. With his and Captain Short’s skills, the gnome terrorists were stopped, although Pip and Kip had been rigged with ‘suicide devices’ to prevent them from ever seeing trial.

In the aftermath of those events, Opal finally secured power when she replaced the dead Council member. Captain Short almost became Major Short but turned down her promotion at the last second. Without the death of Julius Root, she remained in the LEP, although Mulch Diggums still received the occasional tip from an ‘LEP contact’.

When the Hybras crisis began to unfold and the issue of the lost colony of demons needed to be resolved, Opal used memories stolen from Artemis to do a better job of predicting where the demons would appear. Her demon interdiction was successful on her first attempt, and the Paradizo brat never entered the picture. The return of the demons to real-time was a controlled affair, with none of the chaos that had taken place in the original timeline.

Thus, the young Artemis and Captain Short did not have mismatched eyes in the real world. Indeed, they were rather distant compared to their other reality. This time, Opal had been their guardian angel in the field. They did not have to lean on each other. There was not much to bring them together outside of a few missions that went off smoothly.

The relationship was totally different inside of Opal’s dungeon, where her captive Poppy gave birth to the first documented human-fairy hybrid in modern history. The family earned 365 days of being unbothered by Opal, although she had been reluctant to interfere ever since the day they pinned her down.

Poppy and Arty had turned from playthings into keepsakes, and she would often look at their video stream just to be reassured they were still there. They were spoiled with whatever they requested in terms of entertainment, food, and drink, a far cry from the bare, unfurnished room they had started with.

That did not mean she was done taking from them. Unknown to them, Opal also became pregnant. She used one of Holly’s eggs (collected 8 years ago, at the start of their imprisonment) and spliced her own DNA into it. Artemis became the sperm donor (materials were easily acquired by filtering their shower water).

Opal’s child would be a product of the three of them combined. Every empire needed a dynasty, and what better symbol than a fully hybridized being as a symbol of absolute hegemony? When fairies made contact with Mud Men, Opal the foundation would already be laid for the Koboi clan to seize control of everything.

There would be a war, certainly, but chaos would be the perfect excuse to establish her authoritarian regime. She was drawing directly from Artemis when she considered the example of Roman _imperators._ The Council would be abolished, great wars of conquest would be launched to gain more room for fairies, and every household would have a Mud Slave.

The world wouldn’t be hers, necessarily, but it would bear her mark for all time. That would be enough. Her greatest enemies had become neutralized twice over-- one pair thought Opal was their friend and the other set was buried deep, producing a line of children that could be trained as superb generals and tacticians for the coming wars. There was no one left to oppose her. Or so she might have thought.

Eight years after abducting her time travelers, Opal Koboi met her first serious attempt at external interference. Mulch Diggums found her keepsakes, tipped off by Foaly and N⁰1. After years of fetishizing her intellectual rivals, she had forgotten about the damage a single determined dwarf could do, especially when a centaur and a demon were backing him up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided to send off the last batch of lemons with a bang. The last three chapters are going to do something unconventional and they may be published faster than a weekly schedule.


	18. Chapter 18

**The Future**

Julius Root was crushing a cigar between his fingers while Captain Short stood at rest in front of him, trying not to smile.

“Captain, I’m telling you right now that _no one_ is offered the promotion to major twice, let alone three times. This is your last chance. You’ve pushed the envelope for female fairies so far that you’re about to push it off the gods-damned table.”

Captain Short tried even harder to hold onto her composure. Root was giving her a compliment, in his own way.

“And what’s the deal with that smile? Don’t think it was easy getting the LEP administrative board to sign on the request. I had to stick my ears out for you on this.”

“Sorry, sir,” Holly said. “But you said that _no one_ is offered the rank of Major twice. I remember reading that you turned down more than a few promotions.”

“Don’t be clever.” Julius kept shredding his cigar as he rolled it through his fingers. “If you read my file, you’ll know that they forced the promotion on me after the Ghent Massacre. Either I filled in or they would kick me out entirely.”

Julius put his crumbling cigar to the side, looking Holly directly in her eyes. He was going into lecture mode.

“But you aren’t going to be that lucky, Captain. As you can clearly see, no one’s dead. I need one more Major to help me run ops, and you’re the only fairy I can trust for this job. Do you want to take orders from Trouble Kelp for the rest of your career? Is that how far you think female elves can make it in society?”

Holly’s smile dropped.

“What else do you need to be doing up there?” Julius said. “Don’t tell me this is about the Fowl boy, because you know how Internal Affairs treats agents with ‘pets’ on the surface.”

Holly flatly denied that possibility. “No,” she said. “What could possibly lead you to that conclusion?... Sir.”

Julius realized he had gone a little too far and calmed down to explain himself.

“When you came to this division, you seemed so focused on proving yourself. Now you’ve declined a promotion twice. What could have happened other than getting attached to that Mud Boy?”

“That’s not why. It’s been crisis after crisis for years, and somehow, I’ve been dragged into them all. What happens if I accept this promotion and I’m not on the scene when it counts?”

“How do you think I’ve handled this job?” Root asked. “When you can’t be there, you do everything you can to back your fairy on the ground. You trust your fellow officers to complete the mission. That’s what I’m doing here, Holly. I’m trusting you to do what’s right for the LEP when I won’t be the elf to do it personally.”

It was not often that Julius spoke openly and honestly. _Would a promotion really be so bad?_ There were plenty of competent fairies around her: Julius, Vinyaya, N⁰1, and Opal. Even Foaly was useful in his own way. Maybe it really was time to let some other fairy have the chance to save the world.

“Fine,” she said. “You’ve convinced me, sir.”

Julius let go of all the bluster and offered his hand.

“Good choice, Major.” Holly shook the hand he offered and he let the appreciation show in his eyes. “For once in my life, the future of LEPrecon seems bright.”

He had less than a moment of calm before an alarm at his computer went off. He placed his head in his hand and let the harsh noise wash over him.

“Are you going to answer that, sir?” Holly asked.

Julius hit a button and heard Lili Frond’s voice read out a message.

“This is a KBnet advisory: the criminal Mulch Diggums has exited his Zone of Restriction. Last seen heading north from Chicago, United States of America.”

“Well, Major, it seems that you have one last field operation,” Root said. “Get that dwarf back home and tell him he’s used his last ‘favor’ from me. Next time he breaks restriction, the Retrieval fairies will toss him into the worst cell I can find in Atlantis.”

He added one last detail with a wink.

“Feel free to take the scenic way home afterwards, if you need it.”

Holly saluted. “With pleasure, sir.”

“Dismissed, Major. We’ll have the golden acorns ready for you when you get back.”

Holly dialed up Opal as she stepped out of the office and headed for the Ops center. It rang a few times, but no one picked up. Opal must have been on one of her meditation retreats, because Koboi usually was eager to catch up with Holly. They had formed a strange friendship after the pixie had assisted her during the Fowl incident. Their relationship had become even closer in the years afterward as they leaned on each other to keep Haven safe.

The second person she could check with was Foaly, who kept a well-defended office in the Operations center. She knocked a special pattern on his door and waited for his scans. When none came, she got worried.

“Foaly?” she called. “Are you in there?”

“Uh... no,” she heard one of his robots say. “My dude is not available right now. He is... getting a massage.”

That didn’t sound like something Foaly would do at all, unless Caballine was trying one of those fertility treatments she kept mentioning.

“Okay, tell him I’m going to get Opal to help me then, because--”

She was interrupted by Foaly throwing open the door.

“Whatever you do, don’t go to Opal,” he said. Foaly looked like he hadn’t been out of his office in a few days, and his eyes reminded her of the worst of the tinfoil hat days. She also saw N⁰1 seated in a chair, attempting to look nonchalant.

“Hey, N⁰1,” Holly said. “What are you doing here?”

The imp turned his head and continued to act like he could care less.

“Me and Foaly were just hanging out, talking about g- girls,” he said, stammering.

“ _Right_ ,” Holly said, knowing that their subject of discussion would have been anything but girls. “Well, the reason I came down here is because Mulch tripped some sort of alarm topside on his way to Canada. I have to get him back quickly or Root is going to make him do some serious time in a cell.”

“Have you tried calling him?” Foaly asked.

“Yeah, obviously,” Holly said. In fact, she hadn’t tried yet. She was eager to get up to the surface for what might be her last time and figured calling Mulch might negate her only reason to get up there.

Foaly saw through her lie. “Come on, Holly, it’s expensive to run people across the Atlantic. You should at least give it a try. Here, I’ll ring for you.”

The video call went up on screen. Mulch’s hairy face was seen in nightvision and he was looking away.

“What kind of place did you send me to, centaur? There are all sorts of traps, and it’s all old Koboi tech. If I didn’t have bitumen on hand, these guns would have filled me with holes wider than an elven whore’s--”

Mulch checked his screen and saw the three fairies on the other side of the call.

“Please, dwarf, finish that thought,” Holly said, cracking her knuckles.

“Oh, hey, Holly,” he said. “You look like you’re geared up to go to the surface. If it’s for little old me, don’t worry. I’m on official LEP business.”

“If your business was official, you wouldn’t have set off the KBnet.”

“Hey, you know Opal has it out for me. In general, pixies are very prejudiced against dwarves. Maybe the KoBoiNet algorithm is just biased.”

“Seriously,” Holly warned. “If Foaly sent you out, you should know he has no authority to do that, and he can’t keep your infraction from being logged.”

The video feed went dead, but Mulch’s voice was still audible.

“Wait, is that you? What is this? I’m--”

The audio buzzed out into static. Holly presumed the worst.

“No more secrets, Foaly.” She wouldn’t let Foaly’s paranoia get their friend killed.

The last thing Major Short saw was Foaly shrugging regretfully. Something stung the back of her neck and she slumped over.

“One more secret,” N⁰1 said, the sleep spell fading from his fingers. His usually innocent face was lined with grim determination.

“Foaly, get geared up. We’ll have time to apologize to Holly later. For now, we have a dungeon to raid and prisoners to rescue.”

“A please would be nice,” Foaly said, but he was already pulling out his drawer full of gadgets. He had been preparing for a day like this.


	19. Chapter 19

Foaly’s chest was crossed twice by bandoliers, loaded up with an array of specially designed gadgets. He had a bandana tied around his forehead, just like an action flick. N⁰1 had torn the sleeves off of his robe and was practicing poses in the tiny mirror at the back of their shuttle. It had not taken much to get him on board with an unplanned, full-force raid on Opal’s dungeon. They had already hacked several LEP sensors to get to the surface. There was no turning back.

“What do you think happened to Mulch?” N⁰1 asked.

“He’s still alive,” Foaly said. “I know it.”

“Superstition?” N⁰1 asked.

“No, I can read his vitals right now. He’s got a slightly elevated heart rate, but he’s immobile. Probably tied up, being interrogated.”

N⁰1 gulped. If pixie interrogations were anything like demon interrogations, Mulch would be lucky to survive the few hours.

“How are we getting rid of all those defenses?” N⁰1 asked. “I can fight Opal just fine, but not if I’m getting shot at.”

Foaly entered a code into a lockbox in the back of the shuttle and pulled out a device that glowed blue.

“This is something I’ve been working on especially for Opal. A focused solinium emitter.”

N⁰1 knew enough about the radioactive substance to be worried. “A bio-bomb? That’s going to kill us all.”

Foaly shook his mane with impatience. “It’s a focused emitter. I’m only releasing the frequencies that interfere with fairy tech. We operate our electronics at a specific cycle rate, so I can keep it from scrambling our bodies.”

“Oh,” N⁰1 relaxed.

When they approached the mine where Mulch had disappeared, Foaly activated the solinium pulse, aiming downwards. There were no flashing lights or loud sounds, but Foaly knew the job was done.

“Everything that operates on electricity has been disrupted below us. Let’s follow it in before it wears off.”

When the mine had been in operation, large trucks had been used to haul waste out, leaving more than enough space for a shuttle to fly in, which led to an inexplicable pit that was dug straight down.

“Opal must have been working on this place as a hideout for years,” Foaly said.

N⁰1 watched their altitude drop as Foaly navigated them deeper into the silo.

“Are you sure that solinium pulse worked?”

Foaly pointed to a number of orange dots on their sensors.

“Each one of those emplacements is capable of taking out a shuttle like ours in one hit.”

N⁰1 counted more than a dozen before he stopped. Foaly had made his point.

They reached the bottom level, where Opal’s shuttle was still parked. A large piece of rock had been forced out of the ceiling of the cave, no doubt where Mulch had made his entrance.

“Stay frosty,” Foaly said, flipping the safety off on his rotary FoalyTech laser-cannon.

N⁰1 daubed warlock combat paint under his eyes. “I’m the frostiest demon alive.”

The door of the shuttle dropped and they rushed out. Foaly swept his gun around the cavern and N⁰1 followed, hands moving like a martial arts master as he attempted to cover every angle behind them.

“Stairs,” Foaly whispered, and pointed to steps downwards.

N⁰1 went in front, because Foaly would only barely fit his hooves on the steps. At the bottom, he found a reflective wall. It was some kind of monitor, but when he knocked on it, N⁰1 could feel there was space behind it. On a guess, he worked a transmutation charm to make it transparent, revealing an entire room behind it.

When he saw what was behind the wall, he almost fainted. Foaly noticed and rushed down the steps. He was similarly shocked into silence.

Mulch Diggums was seated at a table, being provided with all manner of fairy delicacies. His gracious hosts were none other than Artemis Fowl and Holly Short, their faces distinguishable in the flickering glow of magic light, even after the effects of time travel. Holly’s belly had the tell-tale swell of expectancy.

The group on the inside also seemed surprised to see them, except for Mulch. N⁰1 even saw a little child’s face poking above the rim of a bassinet. The room was furnished, and they all looked well-fed.

His first instinct was to disintegrate the wall and free everyone inside, but something in the magical auras he felt from Artemis and Holly made him stop. He reached out with his own tendrils of magic and discovered clear signs of a control hex.

“Black magic,” he whispered to Foaly. The centaur was still dealing with what he saw.

N⁰1 had no time to wait on pleasantries. “Where is she? Where is Opal.”

Artemis suddenly acted, his hands struggling to cover Mulch’s mouth (a doomed initiative). The dwarf kindly did not eat Artemis’s hands, and instead used his bare foot to kick upwards to show his rescuers where to go.

N⁰1 pulled Foaly back up the steps. Opal was in the room above the cell. The door’s electronic lock was fail-secure, which meant that the solinium pulse had left the door locked. N⁰1 could feel Opal’s presence behind the door but could not understand why the pixie hadn’t emerged and attacked.

Foaly kicked the door down and then N⁰1 jumped in.

“Freeze!” he shouted, but Opal was clearly not in any position to move. She was blindfolded and handcuffed to her bed. The room was redolent with the scent of sex.

The only magic detectable in the room came from the artifact across her neck, a band of braided gold that was absolutely concentrated with magic energy.

It was a torc, N⁰1 realized, the kind of jewelry fairies used to wear in ancient times, and which had been utterly mocked by Abbott, back in the days of the demon colony. The joke had been that they looked like collars.

N⁰1 stepped closer and Opal snapped at him, growling. She didn’t have much choice when it came to communicating-- she had a rod gag in her mouth.

The last reveal was enough to make Foaly whinny in confusion. At the sound, Opal became even angrier. N⁰1 stepped back, expecting firebolts and hex magic, but nothing changed, other than an intensifying field around the torc. He reached his mind out to it and found the magical pattern was deeply complex, beyond even the puzzles he was assigned by Qwan. The spell was full of redundant layers of protection and lines of logic that seemed to loop around and meet their beginnings like some kind of mobius strip.

It was beyond his ability to fully parse in that moment, but N⁰1 could understand its effect: someone had placed that torc on Opal to limit her ability to use magic and harm others. Of course, that did not affect the spells that had already been placed on her prisoners. Those needed to be inspected directly by him.

He led Foaly back down the steps to the prisoner’s room. Mulch had negotiated his way out of conflict and back to shoveling large volumes of food into his mouth. With hesitation, N⁰1 made the wall disappear and stepped inside.

“Welcome,” Artemis said. “As soon as I heard Mulch break through, I was expecting you would not be far after him, my demon friend.”

N⁰1 put aside his wonder at the deductive abilities of Artemis.

“Are you all right, Artemis? And Holly?”

“We’re all right, N⁰1. We must have given you and Foaly the longest ten seconds of your lives.”

Holly’s smile seemed like an act put on for their benefit. Their minds and bodies functioned normally, but N⁰1 could detect that their auras were distorted after years of imprisonment.

“Normally I would have made plans to escape,” Artemis said. “But deploying the torc was the limits of my flexibility. Opal asked to be restrained… and I answered her request with great enthusiasm.”

N⁰1 understood well. He had been educated on the functions of control hexes. Because they relied on an individual’s thought patterns, it was possible to ‘trick’ a hex by splitting an act of rebellion into too many small parts to count. Artemis must have worked on that torc for years straight. Just from the glance N⁰1 had given it, he knew it could be declared a masterpiece, something to be exhibited in a museum.

Unfortunately, N⁰1 also knew that such an exhibit could never happen. The existence of the time-duplicates would have to be kept secret. Opal could not be ignored either, even in her state of restriction.

The torc would have to stay in place on Opal, potentially for all time, because the control hex she had created was deeply woven into the souls of all three parties.

The soul-embedding would not have been present in the first year or so after the creation of the hex, but N⁰1 could tell that it was now too late to undo the spell in any permanent way. The hex would have to be overwritten.

He looked at the faces of his friends, familiar but altered by the years of separation. He looked at the young child they had, and the one that was only a few months from birth. N⁰1 looked at it all, and his heart shrunk with each beat as he silently began to use logic to eliminate happy solutions from his mind.

Artemis and Holly offered him food, or a cup of tea, but he could not accept.

“Foaly,” N⁰1 said, his voice authoritative. “Stay with them. I need to think.”

Foaly watched his friend stride off into the shuttle, the door shutting behind him.

_What’s eating him?_ the centaur thought. _Sure, there was some really freaky stuff going on down here, but everyone’s safe. Fairies live long lives. Holly will get over it. Artemis is... Artemis, so he’ll be just fine too. All N⁰1 has to do is just wave his fingers and undo whatever spell they have._

“Mulch came right on time,” Holly said. “Opal had us occupied upstairs, but when she heard the sound, she sent us to investigate.”

Mulch smiled, food still stuck between his teeth. “I guess Arty here deserves some credit for collaring the pixy.”

Foaly was surprised to see Artemis humble for once, not disputing Mulch’s version of the events.

“So how long is that torc going to be effective?” he asked.

Artemis shrugged. “For as long as it remains on her neck. I included enchantments that will prevent it from being taken off.”

That was a relief for Foaly. He finally relented and accepted a glass of juice. It tasted far better than anything they had in Haven. When he had been told his friends were being imprisoned, he had expected an absolute lack of luxury. The horrors of the situation seemed dulled in the room, with its carpets and sofas and kitchenette. They had better accommodations than some people in Haven. The two of them had even less freedoms, though.

Now that the matter of Opal seemed settled, Foaly had to speak about the obvious subject of interest in the room. He could guess what had happened but the dates and times didn’t line up for him.

“Who is that?” he asked, pointing at the toddler in the bassinet.

“Hyacinth,” Holly said. “Four years old.”

The child heard its name and looked towards its mother. It had the sober gaze of an intelligent child.

“Some would have considered it a challenge finding a name that combined a flowering plant and a figure from Greek mythology,” Artemis added, proud. “Not me, of course.”

Foaly studied the child a little more. The ears were pointed, but not as much as a standard elf. The child’s growth outpaced most fairies, judging by the fact that Hyacinth was already standing. Strangely, the child also had mismatched eyes like its parents, although Foaly was absolutely sure that genetics did _not_ work like that. Hyacinth glared intensely at Foaly for a while, before deciding to smile.

“We haven’t had many visitors,” Holly said. “Especially not centaurs. Hyacinth must be trying to figure you out.”

“So how did Hyacinth... happen?” Foaly asked, realizing there was no way to ask without being incredibly awkward.

“The usual way,” Holly said. She was not willing to go into detail, which made perfect sense.

But it did not account for the obvious inconsistency: Hyacinth (and the next hybrid child on the way) were conceived out of cycle, and with a human. Opal’s involvement was obvious, but Foaly didn’t understand how such a thing could have happened twice.

“It is a story that does not bear telling,” Artemis said. “It took time, but we had no choice in becoming accustomed to this cell, and to our jailer.”

_They don’t look tortured or starved. They have plenty of books in their bookshelf, fairly comfortable furnishings. Opal must have become accustomed to them, too._

“These are still some nice digs, though,” Mulch said. “At least by dwarf standards.”

“It’s yours if you want it,” Holly said. “I just want to see some sunlight.”

Artemis was less enthusiastic. “I still worry about the possibility of imprisonment for our time travel. Your snoopers in orbit are configured to detect anomalies such as us.”

Foaly waved his hands dismissively. “No, no, don’t worry about that. I’ll set up some exceptions in the database and you’ll be free to go wherever you want. Within reason.”

Mulch burped. “If they really want to go on the lam as fairy fugitives, I have plenty of contacts to get them set up. But you’re all ignoring the biggest problem: that pixie you have in bondage gear upstairs.”

Artemis lifted his tunic all the way to his shoulders to show the rune burned into his skin. After years of being activated, the scars had burnt into him. Foaly winced, but it was too late not to see the blackened ring of magic scars. The damaged flesh remained in his mind.

“I cannot participate in any plans against Opal,” Artemis said. “Holly is also marked. If we even hear about a threat to Opal, we are compelled to act.”

“Okay,” Foaly said. He was beginning to understand why N⁰1 needed his quiet time.

Mulch pointed to the shuttle. “Why don’t you be a good centaur and check on how our resident warlock is doing.”

Foaly obeyed without words, his legs moving stiffly. Seeing the permanent wound on Artemis’ chest had put him off balance. He shrugged off his bandoliers and carried them in one hand all the way back to the shuttle. He opened the door to find N⁰1 meditating inside.

“It’s not good,” N⁰1 said.

“Yes,” Foaly said. “But we’re the only ones here who can make it better. I can keep them safe from the authorities and Mulch can help them survive, but the magic...”

He looked to N⁰1 with eyes that had now seen too much.

“The magic is my responsibility,” N⁰1 said, rubbing his face with stubby fingers. “But there’s no easy solution. Opal’s hexes are now imprinted on their souls.”

Foaly tried to apply his technological knowledge.

“What about a factory reset? Or maybe you can overwrite the hex with your own neutral rune?”

N⁰1 shook his head. “I can’t overwrite it or negate it now. It has become part of their very selves-- I can’t erase it without erasing their memories.”

“What about Opal?. Maybe we can cancel the hex from that end?”

“No, I can’t. Holly’s curse is connected to Artemis, and Artemis is connected to Opal. It’s all become braided together like a rope. I can’t undo it.”

Foaly felt a drop of sweat drip down his mane. N⁰1 grew angrier.

“For all the power of the Moon, I can’t even cut it. There’s a reason black magic is so forbidden, Foaly.”

N⁰1’s frustration was evident in his hunched back and shaking fists. Foaly set his gear off to one side and then knelt in front of his partner. Magic alone would not solve the problem, but Foaly was not done thinking.

“I brought a wipe kit,” he told N⁰1. “What if we wipe their memories of this and send them into the future?”

“No. No more time travel. You don’t realize what it’s like to destroy an entire reality. People are alive today that have been dead for years in my memories. There’s a whole N⁰1 that I erased from existence when the ripple happened. No more time travel.”

“Okay, let’s change gears, then. How do we keep Opal from being a problem? She’s on the Council, and Artemis was telling me she has plans to conquer the world. Those plans aren’t ending just because we’re freeing her prisoners.”

“We can’t kill her, not for at least another year. She has a child gestating,” N⁰1 said. “Not to mention that death won’t stop the hexes.”

The demonic tendency to accept violence shook Foaly a bit, but it was a relief to hear that N⁰1 was not planning to kill anyone. He felt he needed to establish some boundaries before they could find out a real solution.

“Okay, we have two cursed friends, a hybrid toddler, and one pregnant megalomaniac. We need to free the cursed people and their child while restraining the pixie permanently. To do this, we can’t erase any of the existing enchantments.”

_As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s more,_ Foaly thought.

“We can’t kill anyone. We can’t use time travel. We also can’t let the duplicates recognize each other on the surface or we’ll have a massive quantum problem.”

N⁰1 put his head in his hands. Foaly then began to list their advantages.

“To help us, we have one world class warlock here, and one technological genius, plus his stealth shuttle full of useful gadgets. We have our friends back, and we have Opal secured safely behind what might be the only useful piece of jewelry ever made.”

N⁰1 looked up and Foaly saw his eyes now filled with determination.

“Let’s do this.”

Three hours later, they emerged from the shuttle with a plan for Artemis and Holly to approve.

It was the best plan they could come up with, but it was definitely not a nice one. There was no taking back what had been lost. The plan was only a way for them all to move forward. Holly and Artemis approved of it after a few hours of debate. Less than a day later, all of the pieces were in place. The elf and her human consort left the pixie’s dungeon, never to return. Opal would never be seen again.


	20. Chapter 20

The sudden disappearance of Opal Koboi was the cause of much chaos in Haven. At Koboi Industries, infighting almost tore the company apart as each department attempted to rule over the others. It was only stopped when Opal’s most senior assistant negotiated a power-sharing agreement between every department. Consequently, Lorelei became the first non-pixie to operate Koboi Industries. It ruffled a lot of feathers among shareholders, but for some reason, fairies found it difficult to remain angry at the sprite.

Despite the absence of its chief benefactor, Koboi Natalics remained on track. Dr. Ginash led her research team to completely liberate fairy fertility through medical treatment. Realizing a lost battle when they saw one, the warlocks of the establishment collectively decided to undo the time-magic that had controlled the People for so long. Contract marriages between pixies lost all viability overnight. The People could now decide for themselves what their future would look like. They would never know what had been done to enable that freedom.

The Council found an interim replacement for Koboi in the form of Shamagh Sool. The gnome had been listed as a trusted delegate by Opal Koboi. Shamagh took the position begrudgingly and spent much of his term being angry that the Council was not getting more business done. In the historical record, Shamagh became known as one of the more popular Councilors.

Captain Short took the promotion to Major. As expected, her service was exemplary. As Major, she spent weeks searching for Opal on the surface, but eventually came to believe that her friend had disappeared on purpose. Major Short had always felt a sense of loneliness in Opal, a hidden secret that could not be shared. Opal was probably off living her secret life. For the sake of their friendship, Major Short gave up on the search and let the pixie keep her secrets.

Years later, Major Short used the benefit of her rank to secure one-day surface visas for two of her mentors. Julius Short and Raine Vinyaya spent their first day of retirement together in the Irish countryside, wandering rolling hills richly carpeted in grass. Silently, they thanked every deity, abstraction, and anthropomorphization available for the miracle of surviving to the end of their career. Both had expected to fall in the line of duty, like so many other fairies of the LEP. By some bizarre malfunction of fate, they were not dead.

Artemis Fowl Junior found that his role in fairy life atrophied as time went on. He lacked the desire to operate criminal schemes against the People, and a further crisis never emerged after Opal’s disappearance to require his intervention. He continued with the other great mission of his life: venturing out into space. With time, he began to think less and less of the fairies and the misadventures of his childhood. He was plotting a better future for humanity.

Mulch Diggums returned to a life of petty crime. He had his share of fun and remained a thorn in the side of authorities everywhere for a number of centuries. His legend extended to dwarves and humans alike. What would not be told in the tales of his career was the constant niggling worm of guilt at the back of his head. Even while he stole some of the most valuable things in the world, he still carried regrets. By the end, however, Mulch learned to forgive himself.

With the disappearance of Opal, demand grew for other innovators in the technological marketplace. Foaly was quite capable of expanding his production to outfit the LEP, and eventually FoalyTech had negotiated a manufacturing deal with Koboi Industries. To Foaly, it never felt as if he had won his old college rivalry. Now his attention was focused on keeping the state of fairy technology at its best, trying to stay ahead of accelerating human progress. His children and his nephew joined the pursuit as time went on, and there were many joyful days full of invention.

N⁰1 grew into the most respected warlock of his era. In lectures to students, he always prioritized the importance of caution. Most of his research focused on the subject of black magic, especially how to neutralize curse runes. His work stalled out for centuries until a breakthrough late in his life, when he rediscovered the field of soul magic.

By then, however, it was too late to help those who inspired him to his quest. Nevertheless, N⁰1’s work saved many more lives in years to come. Haven was not the only place that his work became known. There was one more place where his magic would become part of living legend.

The Gargano promontory emerges from the Adriatic Coast of Italy, north of Bari. Gargano is a mountainous region, but the difficulty of its terrain shelters all of its residents: Citrus ripens all year, and it is also said that the last remnants of an ancient forest survive there, walled off by mountains. There are old oaks in Gargano that will never feel the bite of the woodsman’s axe.

Families cultivate lemons and oranges, using their homes to shelter their fruit from the wind. Surrounded on all ends by the ocean, there is rainfall enough to nourish the plants.

This was the land that had called to Artemis from across time and space. It was something that transcended the similarities between his favorite fruit and his beloved partner—it was like a spiritual connection to the land. In fact, its ability to draw him was so strong that he would be buried there twice.


	21. Chapter 21

There was a certain family in Gargano, just one among many. A man, a woman, and two children. For their neighbors, it had been as if the family had always been there. Although they did not have the common appearance of the region, they were naturally accepted into the community. Indeed, they all spoke impeccable Italian, and their garden of oranges was quite admirable.

For their part, the mother and father of the family had no knowledge that they could be anyone other than themselves. They lived such full lives that their blank pasts never troubled them.

The seasons came and went, the fruit was grown and then picked, and the family remained generally unchanged (excepting the addition of new members). For the farmers there, it was as if the mother, the father, and their progeny were permanent fixtures of their life; existing before they were born and continuing after they would die. Generations of neighbors accepted the longevity of that family as another sign of their blessings, even when no one could quite recall their age...

The fertility of their plot seemed to grow beyond the boundaries of their garden, making an entire community blessed by bountiful harvests. On nights with full moons, it was said that the elderly and the ailing could go to the home of the Little Mother and the Long-haired Father and sleep under one of their trees. When they awoke, the sleepers would find their suffering to have disappeared overnight. The villagers guarded this secret closely, for the sake of the family.

Even so, there came a time that a rich man from a foreign land caught wind of that rumor. This foreigner was old, very old, having lived for more than a century before his most recent bout of cancer had progressed beyond conventional treatment.

Although this foreigner was supposedly the richest man in the world, he had traveled alone to Gargano. He walked laboriously with a cane along the road until he found the home he was looking for. Knocking on the door, the ailing man was surprised by what he saw.

The father and mother of local legend did not seem aged at all to their visitor, although the father was showing signs of gray in his hair. As he looked into the face of the Italian farmer, Artemis Fowl the Second almost felt as if he was seeing family.

“ _Qual è il problema, signore?_ ” the man asked, confused to see such a pale and worn face at his door.

“Might I rest in your garden tonight?” the aged Artemis asked, his Italian spoken with a formal cant. “I can offer you anything you wish.”

The farmer looked at his wife, a woman who was quite short and of darker complexion. He was deferring to her. To Artemis, she reminded him of a companion from a distant past, although the woman had none of the features that concretely identified fairies.

Even after a century of living, Artemis’ mind was razor-sharp. While the woman deliberated in hushed tones with the man, a few dozen possibilities were generated within Artemis’ head. He settled on the _Foresta Umbra_ nearby, the ancient forest that likely had drawn fairies of the past to settle down.

He supposed he was looking at one of the purer descendants of the forest protectors. Some residual Earth magic was creating the ‘blessings’ of this household. When the man and woman were done discussing him (it seemed somewhat like an argument), the woman smiled, and Artemis saw in her face the very light of the world.

“We can’t possibly accept payment from someone who has traveled so far. Please, _signore,_ join us for lunch. If you truly wish it, you can sleep in our garden instead of in a bed tonight.”

Artemis was accepted into the single-story farmhouse. The dimensions were tight, but he found that it only enhanced the warm sensation of a home. A wide table was set for lunch, and the youngest of the children added another plate for Artemis.

The meal was vegetarian but hearty, nonetheless. The food was so delicious that he found his appetite restored for the first time in years. He was only able to eat a few mouthfuls, but it was like receiving _manna_ from heaven.

After the plates were cleared away, Artemis was poured a little cup of espresso. He sipped on it, laboring to swallow even a trickle of liquid through his tumorous throat. He had not caught his breath yet from his walk up to the house. Just a few minutes of moving had thoroughly exhausted him.

He tried to relax in his chair, even with his aching bones and weak body. Escaping his bodyguards, caretakers, and household staff had been his first criminal escapade in a while, but it had been effortless compared to his expectations. By all means, he should have been on hospice care back in Ireland, waiting for death.

The father was pleading with his visibly exhausted guest. “Please, _signore,_ we have a room available for you. Our eldest, Giacinto, is traveling the world, leaving a very comfortable bed. You can rest there before spending the night in our garden.”

Artemis agreed, and was helped up to his feet by a young lass with mismatched eyes. It was only a few steps to the doorway, but the journey felt as if it took a lifetime. Each time he set his foot down, he thought he would never be able to lift it again. He fell onto the bed and then the family tucked him in.

_Had it always been this cold?_ he wondered. He closed his eyes, just to rest them, and woke up only when the nausea had grown unbearable.

Artemis dry-heaved, coughing as his entire body filled with pain. His last meal had finally made it to his stomach and now that organ was bucking under the strain, covered with too much cancerous tissue to function normally.

The family came rushing in to help him, first with an empty tub for the spew that would not come, and then with his cane as they took him to the bathroom. The mother and father laid hands on him, supporting him at the washbasin. He felt the nausea fade and looked up at the mirror ahead of him. The sudden end of his pain was miraculous, but the faces sharing the mirror with him demonstrated no conscious acknowledgment of their miracle. They only looked concerned.

_Wild magic?_ Artemis wondered. _Are they not aware of their power?_

“The garden, please,” he told them, and they bore him there.

The children laid a thick blanket beneath a tree just by the footpath, with a clean sheet over it. Pillows were brought until Artemis was propped up into a position he found relatively comfortable.

He looked down to see the skin of his hands tinted in purple blotches. His toes felt numb in their loafers. Artemis had seen enough deathbeds to understand what was happening to his body now. He had researched the entire process thoroughly. All of the fear he had developed about it had vanished over the afternoon. He was ready for the sunset. Warm hands found his cold, empty palms.

“ _Un arancia,_ ” Artemis said in a failing rasp. “ _Per favore.”_

He was pointing up at the oranges above him. The girl-child climbed into the tree and picked the best one possible. Her mother peeled it and split its sections apart for the benefit of its eater. Their kindness overwhelmed Artemis as the mother pressed a slice of orange into his mouth. It split against his false teeth, and warm juice flooded his tastebuds, sweet and sour combining to restore his taste for one last effort. He chewed on the pulp and swallowed, coughing weakly. His vision began to dim, or maybe it was the setting sun.

“We must call an ambulance,” the father said. “He’s dying.”

Artemis shook his head. “Bring no ambulances. I have been beyond a doctor’s help for some time now. I am even beyond the help of magic and blessings.”

The father tightened his grasp on Artemis’ gnarled hand. “But perhaps they would ease your suffering...”

Artemis tried to smile, tried to show that he had no pain at all now. The chill had disappeared, replaced with a numb warmth. It was as if the touch of this family had healed him of his pain itself.

“Forgive me for commencing this last journey of mine on your land, _signore, signora._ ”

The mother shook her head. “It does not bother us. It was our honor to have such a distinguished visitor.”

The sky over them was the same color as the fruit they fed Artemis. Its shade darkened within minutes, becoming ever more purple as his own breath grew shallow. He only had the time for a few more words.

“If you need anything ever in your life, contact my estate. Your password will be in English: ‘Brownie’. All you must do is say that word, and whatever wish you may have will be granted.”

“Thank you,” the father said, shaking Artemis’ hand. “But do not worry. We have what we need.”

“That is ironic,” Artemis said. “At this moment, I could say the same thing.”

He took a little more of the orange, but its taste had faded down into just a simple hint of citrus. His eyes were actively failing, his vision unfocused and quickly becoming obscure. The last streaks of purple in the firmament above were replaced with a deep black pierced by hazy shapes of unfocused brightness. They were stars.

Artemis had never been able to discover faster-than-light travel or teleportation, although he had made some astounding technological leaps. He had settled for taming Mars and acting as pathfinder for several generations of manned missions. He had spent years chasing that dream. Now the planets he had visited were indistinguishable from stars. He tried to find the red dot, the God of War, that second small step for Man…He thought he could see Mars if he squinted.

“You know,” Artemis rasped in English. “I was there... once.”

Those were the last words of Artemis Fowl the Second. His diaphragm, lungs, and pharynx refused to obey his will from then on.

“ _Si, si,_ ” the father said.

Artemis’ vision was almost completely gone, but he thought he could see a shimmering space across from him, perched in a tree. He tried to point a finger at the shielded fairy, but only achieved a spasm in his arm.

“ _Tranquilo,_ ” the mother cooed to him. Artemis felt a hand run through his thin, patchy hair. It reminded him of his own mother, long gone. The woman began to hum a tune that also called him back to distant memories. It was a lullaby drawing him to sleep.

At long last, night settled in for Artemis. He could see no longer. Everything around him was nothing, except where touch and sound made a valiant last stand against the oncoming abyss. It was a peace like he had never felt before. He had no sadness.

The sea breeze started up, the cooling ocean sending its wind to rustle the trees. The leaves called him to join their dance. Artemis let his body settle into the blanket and the tree, allowed his hands to go limp. His eyes closed and he adopted a calm half-smile as he let himself be drawn away into the night.

-

In the early morning, the team dispatched by Artemis’ Fowl’s adopted family finally caught up to the centenarian, only because he had remained in his final destination for hours. Doctors and bodyguards rushed to the garden and found their patron lying under a tree, surrounded by the family of farmers that had taken him in.

Eight doctors confirmed he was dead and then stood glumly in a circle, unsure of what to do. The bodyguards were also paralyzed. Artemis Fowl had been the central pillar of their work, a seemingly permanent fixture of vitality who insisted on taking solitary walks even as far as a week ago. He was a stern man, but had never been above charity. In times of crisis, his composure had reversed the fates of hundreds. Someone so fiercely independent, who had taken such brave action, could not possibly be dead.

The staff arrived in increasing numbers, as multiple groups converged on the last known location of Mr. Fowl. Everyone had a story, and perhaps even their parents and grandparents had stories. Artemis Fowl the Second, a truly great man.

A general consensus formed among the personnel, deciding that a last-minute escape from hospice to the idyllic Italian countryside was a fitting way for their leader to make his exit. His instructions were clear: he would be buried near where he died, with no ceremony and with utter secrecy.

The family who had hosted Artemis in life thus agreed to host him in death as well. They were generous, caring people, and had developed an unpredictable bond with the eccentric Irish trillionaire.

That was the first time Artemis was buried in Gargano. The second time would be more than 400 years later, but its story is nearly identical.

At last succumbing to old age, the father of that orange-growing family made his exit in peace, flanked by his children, never knowing that he was actually someone else or that his beloved wife was, too.

There is a spot on the family’s farm where a single tall oak sits, its branches shadowing bare earth below it. On the day of Artemis’ second burial, the entire town showed up to pay their respects. After his coffin had been lowered and they returned to their home, a last-minute surprise greeted Holly. The she-pixie she had called her ‘half-sister’ had also made the journey up from her farm north of Bari. Opal had come alone, her one and only child having long ago quit the farm in favor of his own criminal pursuits.

With the death of Artemis just the night before, Holly and Opal had been freed of their memory-suppressing enchantments. Somehow, the both of them had the mental fortitude to prevent instant insanity when their true selves were revealed. Holly had been close to breaking down, but she had years of good memories to rely on. Her life had not really been ‘hers’, but it was far better than the opposite.

Opal had lived a hard, lonely life at the farm for half a millennium, but the centuries of labor had taught her lessons she could never have learned herself. The two fairies were past their middle-age now, and the calamity that had destroyed their personal worlds could not be undone. Their lives had converged for a few terrible years and then diverged into bizarre parallel existences.

Holly and Opal watched as Artemis’ sons and daughters piled handfuls of Earth upon their father’s coffin, burying it deep. Among the children, only Giacinto paused to watch their mother and aunt as they talked without looking at each other.

“N⁰1 knew Artemis’ magic would extend his life. He didn’t need to try and negate your spell, he just needed to establish a barrier against it. Me and him would then be reinforcing that wall against you, just by living together.”

Opal was silent, bitter.

“He encoded the counter-hex into Artemis’ eyes, you know,” Holly said. “Every time I looked to him in love, the barrier against you would grow stronger.”

Opal finished the thought. “And every time I came to see you, ‘sister’, the collar around my neck would be fastened tighter. That imp is clever, I’ll give him that.”

The animosity between Holly and Opal was nostalgic at this point, nothing more. The hate and anger had dried up over centuries of life. Opal moved on like a snake shedding its skin. Holly had built herself an alternative to the life she had lost. There were no winners and no losers. N⁰1’s plan was to call a time-out on the game and hope that all players would give up by the time Artemis could no longer carry the enchantment.

“How is Nero?” Holly asked. “Living up to his name?”

Opal shrugged. “I would have named him Jet if I wasn’t limited to Italian at the time.”

“Does he keep in touch?”

Nero was a son of Holly and Artemis too, by the technicality of genetics, even if Nero only knew them as his aunt and uncle.

“All I know is that Nero is based in Naples,” Opal said, casual even after losing track of her child. “The only news I get about him comes from the press. I know he’s putting his genes to good use. The gangsters there are less of a collection of clans now-- it’s become an empire.”

Holly sighed. “Good for him.”

She had a hard time forgetting that she wasn’t in the LEP now. A fairy getting involved in organized crime wasn’t her problem to solve anymore. If Nero meddled with serious magical power, he would be tagged by LEPrecon and bagged by a retrieval team. Until then, he could live however he wanted

Who knew which parent Nero took after? Artemis, Opal, and Holly had been connected together and pulled apart so many times that it was difficult to tell what any of them had been before Opal had violated their memories and souls. They had lived a parody of domestic life for 8 years and then had their minds wiped to live the next 5 centuries in a fairy-tale. They literally had chosen their new identities.

Artemis, in a choice bit of sentimentalism, had chosen the name ‘Amore’ for himself—he wanted to be known by the word ‘Love’. Similarly affected, Holly had chosen to name herself ‘Rosa’. Their firstborn eventually chose the masculine form—going by Giacinto where once the name had been Hyacinth. Like that, everything that had existed before their memory wipe had been preserved in a strange form. Only Opal had not been allowed to choose.

The children were done with most of the burial. Only one corner of the plot was still exposed, and only a few fistfuls of dirt remained next to the graves of Artemis. Holly took half of it and looked to Opal with meaning. Opal looked confused at the gesture.

“Do you really still hate him?” Holly asked. “He came into this as a child chasing fairy stories. None of it his fault. This is all that is left of him now.”

Opal stared at the soil, eyes widening. The meaning of the burial had just sunk in. Holly tossed her handful of earth.

Opal gathered up the loose dirt in one fist and cast it over the mound. Then she reached up to her neck and unclasped the torc, tossing the golden circle softly into the center of the grave. It was a purely symbolic act. Opal faced Holly afterwards.

The two of them inspected each other, both seeing how time had marked their bodies and how their familiar shapes had been morphed to fit in among the Mud Men. It only reminded them of what they had once been: former rivals, former fairies, formerly young. Nothing of their struggle had been preserved within them except for memories.

Each saw the recognition of the other through their eyes. Nothing else needed to be said. Through the false personality made after the mind wipe, Opal learned what her original life never would have taught her. There were some acts for which apologies could not be asked and forgiveness could not be granted.

With a head bowed in submission, Opal turned and walked out towards town. She would wait alone at the bus stop and take the hourlong ride back to the country. Stepping off the bus, Opal would trudge up the dusty road that would never, ever be paved. Another half-hour into the countryside and she would arrive at her farm, the one she had herself inherited from an old woman with no children. No one was watching her, no one was waiting for her. She accepted the pain of isolation and the burden of labor.

Opal willingly returned to the centuries of meaningless penance that formed the rest of her life.

Holly returned to her children. She didn’t know if she would have chosen to bring them into the world in the circumstances she had. She remembered crying herself to sleep some nights when she had known Hyacinth was on the way in Opal’s prison. It had been terrible to know that actual life was growing inside her in a way that she had not been able to control. And once Hyacinth was born, raising him and shielding him from the whims of Opal had made her sick to her stomach with worry.

It would have been impossible without the love of Artemis. Those early years with Hyacinth convinced Holly that she loved him. He had reassured her and comforted her and served as the vanguard against Opal. His chest, even to his death, was marked with the scars of that long mental battle he had fought. It had been his idea to keep working on the torc as his solution to stop Opal. His efforts were dedicated entirely to saving Holly and her children from a lifetime of fear and pain, even if it meant he suffered.

The return of her earlier memories did not change how Holly had always felt about the children. They were her joy, her only persistent reason for being. They held her close there, at the graves of Artemis. Once the flow of their tears abated, they said a last farewell to him. Together, they turned to face the future.

Only then did she begin to heal.


End file.
